THE HAUNTING 1963

"The dead are not quiet in Hill House."

As a child, I tried watching The Haunting one evening when it aired on network television, but I don’t think I lasted more than 20 minutes…if that. Then more accustomed to the get-right-down-to-business directness of Creature Features–style horror movies, The Haunting’s deliberate pacing and leisurely approach to character and mood severely taxed my ten-year-old attention span.

It wasn’t until a 1999 screening of The Haunting on TCM (to coincide with the theatrical release of the atrocious mega-budget, CGI-laden remake) that I opted to give the film another look. Well, the passing years must have worked its alchemy on either the movie or me, for this time out The Haunting held me in rapt fascination in front of the TV set (do they even call them that anymore?), caught up in 112-minutes of the sharpest, most enjoyably tense movie terror I can recall.

"It was an evil house from the beginning....a house that was Born Bad."
Hill House, the monumentally creepy estate that serves as The Haunting's setting. The mansion is supposed to be located in Boston, but filming took place in the UK and Ettigton Hall (now a hotel) was used for exteriors.

What was tedious and meandering to me as a child was absorbing and spooky as hell as an adult. The characters involved me, the psychological/paranormal uncertainties intrigued me, and I especially responded to the inherent risk in making a haunted house film that dares you to take it seriously. The director respects the genre, the screenplay doesn't insult the intelligence, and the actors don't play down to the material. Best of all: the thrills contained in The Haunting extend so far beyond its ghostly surprises that a great deal of pleasure is derived from rewatching the film just to see the interplay of the characters. The performances are just that interesting, the characterizations just that developed.

When I think of how often it is I find myself, as an adult, at the polar-opposite end of an aesthetic bias I held in my youth, when I'm made aware to what degree my early tastes were shaped by my limited life experience; I can’t help but wonder if American cinema hasn't harmed itself in always so doggedly courting the youth market (The Avengers, The Hunger Games). Movies today are bigger, louder, and faster to be sure (e.g., the aforementioned The Haunting remake), but how good can they be if the whole of the criteria to which they hold themselves are the ADD standards of the texting/tweeting generation?

Julie Harris as Eleanor Lance

Claire Bloom as Theodora

Richard Johnson as Dr. John Markway

Russ Tamblyn as Luke Sanderson

Lois Maxwell  (Bond's Miss Moneypenny) as Mrs. Markway

Clearly not a man to enjoy a little downtime, director Robert Wise, between the mammoth West Side Story (1961) and elephantine The Sound of Music (1965), found time to direct two comparatively small features: the off-beat romance Two for the Seesaw and this modern Gothic ghost story The Haunting. The latter, adapted from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, has a premise that is simplicity itself: four disparate strangers forced to spend time together in one incredibly creepy house with an unsavory past.

Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), eager-beaver anthropologist and self-styled supernatural sleuth, invites several “assistants” to participate in an investigation of paranormal activity in what is believed to be an actual haunted house. Of the several invited to join (culled from a list of subjects “…touched in some way by the supernatural”) only two show up: stylish ESP whiz, Theodora —“Theodora…just Theodora” — (Claire Bloom), and the emotionally fragile spinster Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris). On hand as a kind of drowsy chaperone to the proceedings is Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), born skeptic and nephew to the owner of Hill House. What follows is as much an incisive character study or psychological thriller as ghost story. 

Cast of The Haunting

Somewhere on the path toward chasing the easy dollar, directors of horror films seem to have forgotten that horror is not exactly synonymous with gore. The sense of dread and equilibrium-rattling unease at the core of every great thriller comes from an understanding of that unique quirk of the human mind that makes it possible for a person to scare the hell out of themselves with just the slightest assist from outside stimuli.

The Haunting is famous (and rightly so) for being one of the finest screen examples of nail-biting terror with nary a drop of blood or ANYTHING being shown. I’ve never seen the 1961 film The Innocents (recommended by a reader of this blog, it’s at last on my DVR queue…thank you TCM!) but I understand that it succeeds in much the same way. Through the employment of moodily atmospheric lighting, evocative music, crazily subjective camera angles, and top-grade performances from its impressive cast The Haunting builds and sustains such a high level of wariness and suspense that it fairly gets under your (crawling) skin before you realize it.

The Haunting is a great deal of scary fun

How The Haunting achieves this is rather uncanny, for I’m sure the experience is different for each viewer. In my case, returning to the film after so many years, during which time I’d been exposed to such seminal horror masterpieces as The Exorcist, Alien, The Shining, et.al., I had essentially cast myself in the know-it-all skeptic role that West Side Story’s Russ Tamblyn handles so well. I honestly didn’t think a 35-year-old horror film could pack much punch, and I was only motivated to try The Haunting again because I was so excited about the remake (mostly because of Lili Taylor. Alas, that film found a way of squandering even her talent).

But what took me by surprise in seeing The Haunting again after so long is how it never felt in the least bit dated, and how the overall intelligent approach to the material struck me as almost startlingly atypical for the genre. It reminded me of what I love in Polanski thrillers and typifies the best in the films of Val Lewton (Cat People, The Seventh Victim).

"There won't be anyone around if you need help. We couldn't hear you...in the night. No one could...in the dark...."
Terrifically ghoulish housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley (Rosalie Crutchley)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

A director with a little imagination can bring quite a lot to a genre film if he/she is willing to have fun with its conventions. Horror films are notoriously plot-driven, moving its characters about like game pieces, all in service of coincidence-heavy story machinations. Although a standard ghost story in many ways, The Haunting  nevertheless feels like a different breed of animal entirely, due to the degree of depth with which it depicts its characters. The film invites us to contemplate the possible connection between the escalating intensity of a supernatural “haunting” and the gradual disintegration of a character’s psychological state. In doing so, it’s remarkable to discover how chilling a simply constructed, bloodless horror film can be when time is invested in getting the audience to be receptive to the vulnerable humanity of its protagonists. 

It's not difficult to take note of parallels to Stephen King's Carrie when we learn about Eleanor's back story (repressed youth, social outcast, an unexplained  hail of stones raining on the family house for several days, possible unacknowledged psychic ability). She even has a sister named Carrie!,

PERFORMANCES

I haven’t seen a great deal of Julie Harris’ work, but from the looks of it she was the go-to-gal for repressed, emotionally delicate types. It’s certainly easy to understand why, and by no means is pointing that out a diminution of her talent. In fact, she is to be commended on her consistent ability to add dimension to roles that must appear on paper to be of a rather limited emotional palate. As Eleanor, she is, dramatically speaking, the very center of The Haunting and it’s through her touching and enigmatic performance (Is she mad? Possessed?) that the film draws us in. On repeat viewings it becomes more apparent what a complex character Harris creates in Eleanor. A sad, lonely woman of bottled-up, barely understood emotions, Eleanor can be by turns charming, determined, dreamy, and petulant; all adding up to the kind of realistic characterization necessary to add verisimilitude to The Haunting’s Gothic mayhem.

"To my new companion!"
The stylish Theodora makes the first of several passes at the not-completely-in-the-dark Eleanor.
Claire Bloom is marvelously cool and feline as, if not the first sympathetic lesbian in a major motion picture, then certainly the most unapologetic and self-assured. The scenes between Boom and Harris are virtuoso.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The Haunting is unequivocally and most emphatically a ghost story, but I like how

the film allows for the ambiguous intermingling of the psychological and supernatural. Eleanor’s precarious mental state is revealed to us through the extensive use of first-person voiceover, but this extra-sensory intimacy device only makes us more unsure about her ability to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. As Eleanor’s emotions intensify, there’s the sense that she is perhaps suffering some kind of mental breakdown; practically willing Hill House to be the beckoning destiny she simultaneously fears and desires. Other times, Hill House (always spoken of in terms usually reserved for a living thing) feels as though it is feeding upon and growing stronger from the fears and weaknesses of its inhabitants.

In balancing these complimentary/conflicting realities, The Haunting arrives at a narrative structure which mirrors the discordant perspectives of its characters—the realists: Luke & Mrs. Markway; the psychics: Eleanor& Theodora; and the scientist: Dr. Markway.

Small wonder that The Haunting's reputation as one of the most effective horror films ever made continues to grow with each passing year. Each time I watch it I discover something new. And sometimes, if I really allow myself to get swept up in the ghost story, I can still find myself experiencing the odd goosebump chill as that massive old house goes into its act.

BONUS MATERIAL
For more information and trivia about the making of The Haunting, be sure to check out this wonderfully comprehensive website: The-Haunting.com 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR 1976

Bernice Bobs Her Hair, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s satirically comic, finely-observed 1920 short story about feminine identity in the emergent jazz age, can be read in less time than it takes to watch this exceptional made-for-TV short film adaptation directed by Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street, Crossing Delancey). A movie clocking in at a little over 48 minutes, Bernice Bobs Her Hair is a disarmingly witty little film that offers more food for thought, first-rate performances, snappy dialogue, and keen period detail than most films three times the length and ten times the budget.

Shelley Duvall as Bernice

Veronica Cartwright as Marjorie

Bud Cort as Warren

Dennis Christopher as Charley Paulson

Mark La Mura as Carpenter

Mark Newkirk as G. Reece Stoddard

The moneyed idleness of finishing school girls and prep school boys on summer holiday in Connecticut is a ritualized flurry of status-defining social activities which have about them the contradictory quality of simultaneously relieving and heightening boredom. The time is 1919; the very brink of flaming youth, flappers, jazz, and silent movie vamps. While the conventions of mannered society are stringently observed by young and old alike, those teens fumbling most uneasily on the verge of adulthood can’t resist exercising their newfound independence through small acts of social rebellion.

Among the debutante set, this means engaging in (and trying to navigate one’s way through) behaviors that walk a tightrope between popularity-enhancing daring and ostracized-by-one’s-peer-group scandalousness.

It’s August, and all-around “fun” girl and social hub Marjorie Harvey (Veronica Cartwright) is having her summer fairly ruined by visiting cousin Bernice (Shelley Duvall). In contrast to the well-liked Marjorie who has mastered and understands the seemingly endless little gambits and ploys a girl must practice in order to convey availability through the highly contrived appearance of unavailability, Bernice is dull to the point of distraction. A well-heeled socialite from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Bernice nevertheless suffers from shyness and an overabundance of the kind of genteel femininity that was swiftly becoming passé in the pre-flapper era of the early '20s.

"Bernice, girls our age divide into two groups: there's the ones like me who like to have a good time, then there's the ones like you who just love to sit around and criticize us for it!"

An eye-opening conversation overheard by Bernice (“I didn't mean to listen…at first”) between Marjorie and her mother (Polly Holliday) compels the visiting cousin to grudgingly allow herself to be taken under Marjorie’s wing for a thorough personality overhaul. What follows is a cross between Pygmalion, the third act of Grease, and the “Popular” number from Wicked as Marjorie coaches Bernice in all the finer points of being a sought-after modern woman. As the summer progresses Marjorie proves herself a master educator… but does Bernice perhaps learn her lessons all too well?

So, you think you can dance?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The distancing effect of Bernice Bobs Her Hair’s period setting works to the film’s advantage, allowing for a kind of clear-eyed, dispassionate assessment of laughable social mores not always possible (or welcomed) when the lens of satire is trained on contemporary fads and trends. Additionally, the notion that one’s parents and grandparents might have been plagued by the same adolescent insecurities and pressures to conform that we’ve experienced provides both a historical perspective and a reinforcement of the cyclical nature of human behavior.

When Bernice Bobs Her Hair first aired in 1976 as part of the PBS The American Short Story anthology series, the film was viewed through the prism of mid-'70s second-wave feminism (those years when the initial strides of Women’s Lib began to take root, culturally). With films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), The Stepford Wives (1975), and A Woman Under the Influence (1974) reflecting the evolving cultural prominence of women in the 70s, the duplicitous, restrictive, male-centric behavior of the young women at the center of Fitzgerald’s story appeared foolish, outmoded, and as unlikely for a comeback as the bustle.

Well, here we are in the year 2012, and the litany of silly “how to get a man interested” rules and stringent feminine “dos” and “don’ts” at the center of Bernice Bobs Her Hair (each presuming some innate female inadequacy) look positively dignified in light of the tyranny of reality shows like “The Bachelor” and how-to-catch-and-keep-a-man books like “The Rules.”

You'll be Popular...Just Not Quite as Popular as Me
Marjorie (Veronica Cartwright) and Roberta (Lane Binkley) prepare for the Country Club dance

PERFORMANCES

As earlier posts will attest, I am thoroughly besotted with Shelley Duvall. Here, as she did so artfully in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Duvall brings an oddball stamp of pluck and silent self-regard to characters who, as written, would otherwise be pitiable or pathetic. Duvall’s Bernice may be socially withdrawn and ill-at-ease around members of the opposite sex, but it’s clear she holds an opinion of herself more solidly defined than that of her rather superficial cousin. Bernice’s willingness to undergo a personality makeover is born more of a kind of misdirected introspection (there’s a scene wherein she more or less encounters herself in male form—the reserved and judgmental ministry student, Draycott Deyo) than poor self-esteem.

Duvall's transformation from wallflower to man-trap is a delight 

I don’t believe there exists on film an uninteresting Veronica Cartwright performance. Splendid in Alien and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as the vain and spoiled socialite of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Cartwright displays a comic timing and command of expression and inflection that lends bite to her scenes of bitchiness and real humanity to those moments that reveal the coward behind the monster. Her scenes with Duvall are marvelously engaging in their chemistry.

The character of Yale undergrad Warren McIntyre is sketchily drawn in Fitzgerald’s story, but as embodied by baby-faced Bud Cort (the victim of Shelly Duvall’s betrayal in Altman’s Brewster McCloud, but better known for Harold & Maude), Warren is a mass of post-adolescent agitation and self-seriousness. Wearing the expression of one perpetually amazed by the depth of his own emotions, Cort mines pure comic gold in fleshing out an otherwise stock Ivy League character.

Unburdening himself to Bernice, Warren longs to reveal his true self by becoming a writer. Albeit under the deliciously loony pseudonym of Charlotte Van Heusen.
"I don't want anyone to know it's me. I'm in too much pain."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Someone once said that it’s the responsibility and privilege of the young to blaze new trails and challenge social convention, for in nonconformity lies progress. What’s fascinating to ponder is how significant a role hair and hairstyles have played in the shattering of social conventions throughout history.

As was the style of the day, the socialites in Bernice Bobs Her Hair sport mountainous piles of hair. The numerous scenes of women fussing and tending to their hair dramatize the dichotomy posed by the narrative. Long tresses may be a badge of femininity and old-world gentility, but their need for constant care inhibits female mobility and freedom. With its minimal upkeep requirements, the short bob haircut was liberation personified and branded the ideal symbol for the modern woman. Alas, its lack of social precedence and too-close association with the morally suspicious silent-screen “vampires” also branded the haircut as immodest and instantly scandalous (aka, rebellious).

Braiding is a motif repeated so often in Bernice Bobs Her Hair that the ritual begins to take on the weight of metaphor - the braids come to resemble ropes tying the women to constrictive notions of femininity.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

One of my favorite exchanges in the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story didn’t make it to the film.

Marjorie’s mother is trying to make sense of the fuss Marjorie is making over Bernice not fitting in with her social crowd. From where Marjorie’s mother sits, there’s not much to be gained in the shallow approval of people who scarcely seem interested in you in the first place.

Mrs. Harvey: “What’s a little cheap popularity?”

Marjorie: “It’s everything when you’re eighteen!”

And so it is. The world of an eighteen-year-old will undoubtedly expand, but for that brief moment in time (which can feel like an eternity) when one’s entire universe is inhabited exclusively by immediate family and the kids you go to school with, the petty concerns of popularity and peer acceptance can take on the importance of world-turning events.
There's no way to watch Bernice Bobs Her Hair without acknowledging, time and time again, how little has changed in the realm of human interaction since 1920. 
Bernice: "My philosophy is that you have to either amuse people, feed 'em, or shock 'em!"

Those words, written in 1920, could literally be Lady Gaga's mantra.

A World on the Verge of Change

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

ONE FROM THE HEART 1982

Stephen Sondheim’s onetime-flop/now-revered 1971 Broadway musical, Follies: a tuneful, dark-hued elegy to aging and its attendant lost illusions, has always been one of my favorites. At age 14, my adolescent arrogance (a redundancy if ever there was one) convinced me that I had fully understood the show’s themes, when in honesty, all that my then-limited life experience could reasonably have brought to the table was sympathy. Now that I’m roughly the same age as Follies’ representative cast, I find the show to be not only infinitely smarter and more insightful than initially thought, but the passing years have added empathy to the mix. What I know now that I couldn’t have known at 14 is that the follies of one’s life aren’t regrets; they’re just youthful dreams that have just grown too burdensomely heavy to continue to carry with us as into old age.

This all calls to mind Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious but flawed dream-project, One from the Heart being dubbed “Coppola’s Folly” on release, and the irony of its creation being instrumental in the demise of that other Coppola dream: his American Zoetrope Studios. As someone who came of age and developed a love for movies during the youth-centric, formative years of The New Hollywood out of which Coppola emerged (roughly 1967 to 1979), I've discovered one of the more sobering realities of aging has been bearing witness to what’s become of the ideals and ambitions of the golden boys of the Hollywood Renaissance.

Francis Ford Coppola takes an ordinary couple and places them at the center of an extraordinary, fantasy vision of Las Vegas

George Lucas, the once-venturesome director of the lively American Graffiti, now seems a virtual prisoner of his own success, holed up in Skywalker Ranch like Charles Foster Kane in Xanadu, content to spend his days endlessly tweaking and re-tweaking the same movie; film geek Peter Bogdanovich, after a couple of ill-fated Svengali episodes, reached creative stasis after exhausting his fan-boy catalog of borrowed film styles; Martin Scorsese is making kid’s films in order to stay relevant; and Steven Spielberg, always more a company man than maverick, has emerged more quotidian and old-guard than the most journeyman of filmmakers from the rigid days of the studio system.

Of all the directors of the era, the trajectory of director Francis Ford Coppola’s career is perhaps most indicative of what was right (individualistic, innovative, artistic) and wrong (arrogant, undisciplined, insulated, and out-of-touch) with the American New Wave in cinema of the '70s. His Godfather films (1972 & 1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979) all made good on the movement’s assertion that commercial film was a viable medium for artistic and personal expression. Of any of that film-school breed to proffer themselves as the worthy heir to the throne of the deposed moguls of yesteryear, Coppola alone seemed to possess the requisite business smarts and creative vision to see it through. Or so it seemed.

Raul Julia and Teri Garr lead a cast of seeming hundreds through a dance number staged on one of the meticulously recreated Las Vegas street sets 

Throughout his career, Coppola has spoken out (exhaustively) about the levels of studio interference he’s had to battle in order to get his films made. His unparalleled track record of critical and commercial successes only seemed to confirm his contention that meddlesome studio heads were the enemies of art. When, in 1980, Coppola purchased Hollywood General Studios to form his own, independent motion picture studio—American Zoetrope—it was the realization of a groundbreaking New Hollywood ideal: a space to make films independent of the interference of the Hollywood money men. 

Oh, but that Coppola could have had such interference. 

As the studio’s debut feature, Coppola envisioned a simple, old-fashioned Hollywood musical given a modern twist through the employment of cutting-edge digital filmmaking innovations Coppola would come to dub “Electronic Cinema.” This allegedly creativity-enhancing/money-saving innovation proved no match for a director unable to understand that technology fetishism is never a viable substitute for basic storytelling skills.

Teri Garr as Frannie

Frederic Forrest as Hank

Nastassja Kinski as Leila

Raul Julia as Ray 

Have you ever had a McDonald’s hamburger served to you on an antique sterling silver salver tray? No? Well, if you had you would have some sense of what it’s like to watch One from the Heart; an intimate, almost inconsequential, character-driven dramatic musical about a young couple as ordinary and uninteresting as any you’re likely to meet, inflated to near-bursting by a staggeringly inappropriate $23 million budget. Frannie works at a travel agency while Hank is co-owner of an auto junkyard. After five years together, on the eve of their July 4th anniversary, the couple finds themselves at a romantic crossroads: she wants adventure, he wants stability. How each works through their respective five-year itches is beautifully rendered in a meticulously recreated Las Vegas (everything was shot on the Hollywood sound stages), but the content never justifies the presentation.

It’s my guess that One from the Heart, in all its brobdingnagian excess, is attempting to comment on the transformative power of love and its ability to make even the most unprepossessing of souls feel as though they have suddenly stepped into one of those lushly romantic, old-fashioned MGM musicals. A charming idea, conceptually speaking, that holds a great deal of potential. It’s only in the practical application where things start to hit a snag. Where a feather-light touch and considerable wit is required for this kind of material, One from the Heart keeps tripping over its own intentions because Coppola’s directorial approach to tender matters of the heart is to pound you over the head with his tinker-toy infatuation with the technological.

To anyone who has ever actually experienced the pains and joys of life, love, and romance, it’s plain that the only intensely felt passions on display in One from the Heart are the hots Francis Ford Coppola has for his “Electronic Cinema” gadgetry. A prime example of a man so lost in an onanistic orgy of film love that, $23 million later, he failed to even notice that he hadn’t yet made a movie.

Frannie finds her idealized vision of romance in singing (and apparently dancing) waiter,  Ray

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

By 1982, bad word of mouth preceding the release of a Francis Ford Coppola film was as common an occurrence as an appearance by Charo on The Love Boat. From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now, Coppola seemed to willfully perpetuate the image of himself as the wild cannon maverick who could pull a masterpiece out of the ashes of months of troubled production rumors and bad press. It’s in light of all this that Coppola’s long-held assertion that One from the Heart didn’t get a fair shake from the press has never quite rang true.

I remember being among the throngs of people clogging the streets of Westwood Village in Los Angeles, excited beyond all reason at the prospect of getting a pre-release glimpse of One from the Heart in January of 1982. The crowd was abuzz, each of us parroting to the other Coppola’s rhetoric hype about being eyewitnesses to the beginning of a new era in filmmaking.

One of the many miniatures of Las Vegas signs used in the film's clever title sequence. I got the opportunity to see this and many of the other props from One from the Heart when, in 1984, American Zoetrope auctioned off its assets after declaring bankruptcy. As staggeringly beautiful as it all was, it was also very sad.

As is typical at these kinds of preview screenings, a general atmosphere of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” takes over and everybody loves EVERYTHING. Each set, dissolve, and digital camera trick was greeted with thunderous applause (in part, I suspect, because we all thought Coppola was somewhere in the audience) and we were all convinced that we were watching the Citizen Kane of the '80s. It wasn’t until I was walking back to my car that I realized that all of my laughter had been forced, all of my emotional responses self-generated; and though dazzled by the visuals, a great many of the much-touted innovations were in reality, age-old theatrical stage effects (walls dissolving, color fades). I love romantic films and anyone who knows me knows that I'm a sentimental slob who cries at the drop of a hat...and yet the only sequence that brought forth waterworks was the finale…and even that was due more to the still-touching-to-me instrumental theme "Take Me Home," arranged to sound like a child’s music box. 

Reluctantly I had to admit that all of my positive feelings about One from the Heart were keyed in to my anticipation of the project and to the artistic potential Coppola’s candy-colored confection presented. One from the Heart’s visuals and technology were indeed impressive, but as evidenced by the audience’s meeting each display of cinema magic with a round of applause; none of us got lost in the magic enough to stop taking notice of it. Shades of Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York!

PERFORMANCES

The structure of a great many musicals is to have at their center, incredibly ordinary, if not downright dull characters (e.g., Bells are Ringing, Sweet Charity, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Oklahoma) who find their lives magically transformed by love. However, few, if any, of the people involved in the making of these movies have ever been so ill-advised as to actually cast dull, ordinary people in these roles. Both Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr are wonderful, talented character actors, but neither has the requisite something (star-quality?) to make watching them more interesting than, say, spying on my neighbors over the back fence. (Imagine the 1949 Stanley Donen musical, On the Town with the emphasis placed on the Ann Miller/Jules Munshin romance instead of Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen.) 

Hammering home the obviousness of this fact are One from the Heart’s stupendously charismatic co-stars, Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia. Both actors have in abundance what the film’s leads lack: screen presence. I kept wishing the story would somehow shift gears and magically become a love story about the circus girl and singing waiter.

Harry Dean Stanton and Lainie Kazan are terrific in their brief roles as the supportive friends of the constantly bickering lead couple 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

For good reason this blog isn’t titled “Levelheadedness is What Le Cinema is For…”, because movies, like dreams, have this ability to get to us on so many different levels…even when said dream or movie doesn’t make a lick of sense. By the same alchemy that interprets movement from still images flickering past one’s eyes at 24-frames per second (precisely the way a zoetrope works, the magic lantern device from which Coppola’s production company derives its name), One from the Heart’s almost non-stop flashes of technical brilliance do much to mitigate the emotional hollowness at the center of the whole enterprise. The shimmering images Coppola devises for One from the Heart enchant in a way not dissimilar to mentally flipping through an expensive coffee table book on photography; beauty in no need of context.

Fanciful imagery abounds: Hank finds his romantic ideal in circus performer, Leila - here seen dancing in a martini glass

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

When it all began, the New Hollywood presented itself as the antidote to the bloated, outmoded, assembly-line methods of studio system filmmaking. With minimal budgets but ingenuity and talent to spare, a veritable army of young and enthusiastic movie-makers succeeded for a time in rejuvenating American motion pictures in a way we will likely never see again. 

Unfortunately, success begat money, money was met with unbridled freedom, and with freedom came arrogance, a lack of discipline, and even respect for the principles that inspired the revolution in the first place. Directors once up in arms over the fact that the budget for a single over-inflated bomb like Paint Your Wagon ($20 million) could have financed 20 smaller, perhaps better films, themselves nearly brought the industry to its knees due to their own ego-driven excesses.

Of all the golden boys who imploded when given a big budget and free-rein (Michael Cimino -Heaven’s Gate, Stephen Spielberg – 1941, Martin Scorsese - New York, New York) it can at least be said of Francis Ford Coppola that he bankrupted his own studio and wasted his own money.

The version of One from the Heart currently available on DVD has been re-edited and is a tighter, and in some ways, better film than the one I saw in previews back in 1982. Alas, there’s just no getting past the fact that this neon heart has no real pulse. One from the Heart feels like a film made by someone who knows an awful lot about movies, but not much about life.

One from the Heart would have benefited greatly from the intimacy Coppola brought to The Conversation. Instead, this simple romance was handled with the bombast and overkill of Apocalypse Now

Today, One from the Heart still has the power to thrill me as eye candy, and pleases with its sometimes hauntingly beautiful jazz-tinged score, but in an odd way, it offends me in its epic waste.
In The Towering Inferno Paul Newman says of the smoldering shell of the skyscraper that needlessly took the lives of so many: “I don’t know. Maybe they ought to just leave it the way it is. Kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”

Maybe that’s One from the Heart’s ultimate merit: it stands as a melancholy shrine to all the tarnished optimism and corrupted ideals of the Hollywood New Wave of the '70s.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Teri Garr autograph from when I was working at a bookstore on Sunset Blvd.

Harry Dean Stanton autograph I got when he came to the Honda dealership where I used to work

Copyright © Ken Anderson

HARRIET CRAIG 1950

 “When she was good she was very very good, but when she was bad she was better.”

If ever there was an actress about whom the above quote applies (wholeheartedly and in all its transmutations) — it’s Joan Crawford: one of the few actresses I find equally fascinating whether she’s delivering a good performance or gnawing at the scenery. An actress capable of sometimes astonishing emotional subtlety, what with the quicksilver flashes of tenderness or wounded vulnerability those fabulously expressive eyes of hers could convey; she was equally enjoyable as an over-the-top, tough-as-nails, slightly mannish, bitch-goddesses. 

Harriet Craig, the story of a woman who takes the role of housewife to its literal and tragic extreme, is a film that had been on my “must see” list since the early '80s when someone informed me that Crawford’s daughter Christina (she of the incendiary Mommie Dearest) recommended it along with Queen Bee as the two films to see if you wanted to get a glimpse of what the real Joan Crawford was actually like. Already acquainted with the extravagant camp of Queen Bee, I finally got to see Harriet Craig back in 2007 when TCM hosted a Joan Crawford marathon.

The verdict? Well, as a representative page carved out of the post-Mommie Dearest Joan Crawford mythos, Harriet Craig doesn't disappoint. On the contrary. The film is full of so much melodrama and overheated emotion that for long stretches of time it feels as if you’re watching Joan Crawford as Faye Dunaway portraying Joan Crawford. Harriet Craig (the third screen incarnation of George Kelly’s 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Craig’s Wife) is in many ways the quintessential Joan Crawford vehicle. Drawing upon little more than the same standard-issue icy imperiousness she brought to almost all of her post-MGM roles (regrettably, she doesn't slap anyone here, but that’s about the only thing missing from her usual arsenal), Joan Crawford and her grande dame of the screen image are so perfectly suited to Harriet Craig, it feels as though the role had been written expressly for her.

Joan Crawford as Harriet Craig

Wendell Corey as Walter Craig

K.T. Stevens as Clare Raymond

In all matters practical, Harriet Craig is the perfect wife. Beautiful and poised as a hostess, attentive and spuriously deferential to her adoring husband Walter; Harriet runs their tastefully elegant upper middle-class home with the efficiency and warmth of a science lab. In that curious definition of “housewife” indigenous to the moneyed set, Harriet neither cooks nor cleans, raises no children, and has no job. She merely spends every waking hour running roughshod over the harried staff of housekeepers (servants, as she likes to call them), even going so far as to engage Clare, her grateful, poor-relation cousin, as free labor. All in the service of creating the perfectly clean, perfectly orderly, perfectly loveless home. Trouble arises when Harriet, fearful that a job promotion for her husband might loosen the short tether she has kept him on for the entirety of their marriage, attempts to broaden the scope of her manipulation.

Harriet Craig's cousin Clare, pretty much where Harriet likes to keep her at all times

The possessive title of Craig’s Wife, which both the 1928 silent (now considered lost) and the 1936 Rosalind Russell film adaptations retained, hints not only at the original play’s dated mindset, but subtly of its narrative thrust. In both versions Harriet is obsessed with her image and social position and goes to extreme lengths to prevent her name (that of being Craig’s wife) from being involved in any scandal.

Much in the manner that the title of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler suggests the emotional remove of its protagonist from her married identity of Hedda Tesman, the revamped Harriet Craig is less about a woman’s fear of losing her social status as it is about her full and complete fixation on the marriage state as a means of obtaining emotional and financial security for herself. The husband is merely a means to an end.

Craig's Law
"Marriage is a practical matter. A man wants a wife and a home, a woman wants security."

Updated for the '50s, Harriet Craig wisely jettisons a distracting murder/suicide subplot that figured significantly in Craig’s Wife and instead settles itself firmly in traditional Crawford territory: a domineering woman attempting to manipulate the lives of those around her. Though melodramatic in structure, this suburban domestic cautionary tale is directed with an appealingly light touch by Vincent Sherman (who also directed Crawford in The Damned Don’t Cry and Goodbye My Fancy), getting overall relaxed performances from the cast that contrast to good effect with Crawford’s appropriately starchy overemphasis.

Mr. Craig, feeling amorous; Mrs.Craig, sizing up the matrimonial checks and balances

  

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

A common criticism leveled at the film adaptation of Mommie Dearest was that its screenplay appeared to have been cobbled together from old Joan Crawford movies. Looking at Harriet Craig it’s hard to argue that point. The fictional Harriet Craig is every bit the neat-freak obsessive that Crawford was made out to be in real life, complete with a poverty-motivated backstory not dissimilar to Crawford’s own. So closely does Harriet Craig hew to our common perception of Joan Crawford as an anal-compulsive nightmare, entire scenes of Harriet going ballistic over some housekeeping transgression could be excised, colorized, and inserted into Mommie Dearest with disconcerting ease.

The Help
Housekeepers Mrs. Harold (Viola Roche) and Lotite (Ellen Corby) in a rare moment of peace
Mrs. Harold- She is particular.
Lottie- Particular? She's peculiar! I bet if she had her way she'd wrap up this whole place in cellophane.

And therein lies one of the essential guilty pleasures of Harriet Craig (and to the same degree, Crawford’s Queen Bee): it’s like watching Mommie Dearest with the genuine article. I like Crawford very much when she’s good, but she is untouchable playing bad. She is such a raving monster in Harriet Craig that the DVD would not be out of place in a store's horror movie section.

  

PERFORMANCES

The much-maligned Joan Crawford is one of my favorite actresses. Even taking into account her mannered acting style and the severe, exaggerated appearance she adopted as she matured, to me she remains the most consistently interesting of the classic leading ladies of the silver screen. Truth in fact, I think I like her to a great extent because of her stylistic excesses. It’s often said of Crawford that she was more a movie star than an actress, but I’ve never found her to be any more one-note than respected studio-system stars like Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn or Humphrey Bogart. I just think it’s a matter of taste. Personally, I never had much of a stomach for Cary Grant and find him to be one of the more arch and artificial stars (to borrow a line from Singin’ in the Rain) in the Hollywood firmament. Crawford, for all her studied emoting is a fascinating screen presence, and while only occasionally genuine, is always interesting.

Harriet is made somewhat sympathetic by having the motives for her compulsions rooted in being abandoned by her father at a young age and seeing her mother (Virginia Brissac) deteriorate into dementia

Like most that have achieved and sustained movie star status, Crawford’s screen persona and perceived private personality were so intrinsically intertwined that, intentionally or not, her roles came to be imbued with a voyeuristically autobiographical essence. A phenomenon with Crawford’s work that has oddly increased, not lessened, over the years. There’s no way to watch Harriet Craig today without being continually hit in the face with the Crawford mystique. When scenes are not suggesting some passage from the Mommie Dearest canon of obsessive perfectionist, they’re recalling the haughty shrew characterization she fairly patented in the look-alike films that come under the heading “Joan Crawford vehicles.”

It must have been a Crawford contractual stipulation to have at least one shot where a band of light illuminates her eyes while the rest of her features remain in shadow. I seriously can't think of a Joan Crawford film I've seen without it.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Were I writing about Harriet Craig back in the '60s or '70s, I would be declaring the film outdated and its heroine hopelessly out of touch with the ways men and women interact. But here we are in 2012 and Harriet Craig’s rather cold-blooded philosophies seem to be depressingly right in step with the times. In a comment to my previous post on The Bad Seed, a reader observed how the confidence and sense of entitlement displayed by Patty McCormack’s Rhoda would likely make her a CEO in today’s world. Similarly, I think Harriet Craig’s calculating pragmatism when it comes to love and marriage would today land her a bestselling book deal and make her the darling of the misguided, post-feminist set drawn to reality-TV contests in which women strike bargains to be snapped up by so-called eligible bachelors, or read books that provide "rules" for getting a husband. Making the talk-show circuit, Harriet's 1920s philosophy would no-doubt be seen as "empowering." 

The Rules meet The Bachelor: 1950s style
Harriet- Oh, stop yelling! What are you complaining about? You've had your share of the bargain.
Walter- Bargain? I never thought of our marriage as a bargain.
Harriet- Every marriage is. You wanted a wife to run your house and make you comfortable. Well haven't I done that? Have I ever neglected you? I've kept myself attractive and seen to it that you were never bored. Whatever you wanted...no matter how foolish and inconvenient it was for me...I've always seen to it that you were satisfied. What more do you want?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

In appraising Joan Crawford’s Harriet Craig side by side with Rosalind Russell’s Craig’s Wife, I’d say that Russell’s is unquestionably the better performance (Russell’s performance actually gave me waterworks at the end), but Harriet Craig is the better film. The changes made to the original plot result in a tighter narrative and clearer central focus: Harriet’s pledge to herself never to wind up like her mother. What it loses is largely due to the lack of depth in either Crawford's performance or the screenplay. Crawford's Harriet is perhaps too steely to inspire much in the way of empathy.

Still in all, the film is a fascinating look at the somewhat superhuman expectations placed upon women in the achievement of the suburban ideal (add a couple of kids, a nicer disposition, and some genuine feeling for her husband, and she’s basically the perfect wife), and in a way, shows what happened to the role of the film noir femme fatale after the war—she became queen of the house.

A House is Not a Home

Copyright © Ken Anderson