BYE, BYE, BIRDIE 1963

Sure, Bye Bye Birdie is a bright, lively, tuneful, only intermittently funny satire of teenage pop culture in the '60s. But as far as I’m concerned, Bye Bye Birdie has two huge assets (I know what you’re thinking…and you should be ashamed of yourself!) which make it one of my all-time favorite movie musicals. Those assets: the unstoppable star-quality of Ann-Margret, and the snappy musical staging and choreography by Onna White. 

Ann-Margret as Kim McAfee

Bobby Rydell as Hugo Peabody

Dick Van Dyke & Janet Leigh / Albert Peterson & Rose DeLeon

Mary LaRoche & Paul Lynde / Doris and Harry McAfee

Jesse Pearson as Conrad Birdie

Adapted from the 1960 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Bye Bye Birdie pokes gentle fun at America’s burgeoning youth culture by spoofing the real-life pandemonium surrounding hip-swiveling pop star Elvis Presley being drafted into the army in 1958. Standing in for Elvis in the musical is the fictitious rocker Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson): a beer-swilling, ill-mannered, libidinous hillbilly who wreaks havoc on prototypical Midwestern small town, Sweet Apple, Ohio when he arrives to bestow a symbolic coast-to-coast televised goodbye kiss on an adoring female fan before being shipped overseas.

Cue the generation-gap complications and small-town vs. show-biz culture clash hijinks. None of which, I might add, should anyone having even the most cursory familiarity with '60s-era sitcoms should have trouble staying one step ahead of. Bye Bye Birdie, when it’s either singing or dancing, is the most engaging and sprightliest of musicals, full of fun and as eager to please as a puppy. In its quieter moments—scratch that, there are no quieter moments—in its non-musical moments, Bye Bye Birdie's amusing, if not particularly funny, screenplay feels a tad labored and more than a little creaky.
Rooted in a kind of broad, over-emphatic acting style of most sixties sitcoms (a style that struck me as riotous when I was nine, a good deal less so now) and over-reliant on moldy, near-vaudevillian comedic shtick of the sort that considers silly names (Hugo Peabody) and wacky plot contrivances (that deadly speed-up pill subplot) the height of comedic brilliance; Bye Bye Birdie stays afloat chiefly through its simple desire to entertain and because of the buoyant charm of its talented and energetic cast.

The Sweet Apple chapter of The Conrad Birdie Fan Club 
(fronted by Ann-Margret and Trudi Ames) pledge undying allegiance.

The film version of Bye Bye Birdie was significantly (and, as per the voiced consensus of Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde, and Maureen Stapleton, controversially) retooled from the stage production. Primarily a middle-aged romance (Albert & Rosie) against a satirically rendered teen-culture backdrop, the Broadway production was nominated for eight Tonys, winning four: Best Musical, Best Director, Best Choreography, and Best Actor (Van Dyke). By the time it reached the screen, what was essentially a Dick Van Dyke showcase was fashioned by director George Sidney into a $6 million valentine to vivacious protégé Ann-Margret.
This was Ann-Margret's third film (she made her debut in Pocketful of Miracles, and assumed the Vivian Blaine role in the 1962 remake of State Fair), but thanks to Sidney's loving attention and her heretofore peripheral character being thrust to the film's center, Bye Bye Birdie is the movie most people credit with making her a star.

What began life as an anti-rock & roll musical fashioned to reflect the middle-age mentality of adult Broadway audiences reeling from rock & roll upstarts like Elvis stealing the Sinatra crown, arrived on the screen as a youth-centric glorification of teenybopper culture that effectively allocated once-prominent adult plotlines and relationships to the sidelines to make way for the fresh vitality of its young cast members (aka Ann-Margret). With Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde the only carry-overs from the Broadway show, numerous songs jettisoned and plotlines abandoned or reworked; Bye Bye Birdie became the ironic embodiment of all that the Broadway play had spoofed. Bye Bye Birdie, hello to the first multimillion-dollar teenage musical!

Paul Lynde's comedic number, "Kids" was a showstopper that brought down the house on Broadway. When speaking of his much-abbreviated screen role, Lynde was fond of saying of the film, "They should have retitled it, 'Hello, Ann-Margret'!" 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One look at Bye Bye Birdie and it’s easy to see why it has become one of the most imitated and referenced movie musicals since The Wizard of Oz. Each number in the bouncy Charles Strouse / Lee Adams score is given almost cartoonishly vibrant life in increasingly clever and dazzlingly cinematic ways. So many large-scale musicals fall into the trap of thinking that mere size and expense is enough to make a film fun and energetic; Bye Bye Birdie is that rare example of a musical whose scale perfectly fits its subject, and whose accumulated talents (dancers, singers, cinematography, color, choreography, staging, and minor special effects) all remain on the same creative page. Every number throughout is infused with a lighthearted wit and silliness that remains true to the escapist tone of the entire enterprise. The effective musical film is almost a lost art, but Bye Bye Birdie is a glowing example of the genre done right. Small wonder that musicals like Grease and Hairspray, and entertainments as diverse as music videos, TV’s Mad Men, and Disney’s High School Musical franchise, have all owed a debt to Bye Bye Birdie.

The combined talents of director George Sidney (Pal Joey, Annie Get Your Gun) and choreographer Onna White (The Music Man, Oliver!) result in a movie whose clever, eye-popping musical sequences are a great deal of silly fun and still have the power to delight and captivate after all these years.

"The Telephone Hour (Going Steady)" predates the look of MTV music videos; "Put on a Happy Face" makes imaginative use of cute, if primitive special effects; and "A Lot of Livin' to Do" is a powerhouse production number of unparalleled energy and witty choreography.

Oscar and Tony Award-winner Maureen Stapleton makes her musical debut in
Bye Bye Birdie as  Mae Peterson, Albert's dominating mother.

PERFORMANCES

In her 1982 book 5001 Nights at the Movies, fave film critic Pauline Kael wrote the following about Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie...and I couldn't have said it any better: “Ann-Margret, playing a brassy 16-year-old with a hyperactive rear end, takes over the picture; slick, enameled, and appalling as she is, she’s an undeniable presence.” 

OK, I might have left out “appalling.”

Real-life teen idol Bobby Rydell makes his film debut as Ann-Margret's love interest

Beyond that, Kael pretty much nails Ann-Margret’s appeal for me in this film and why any director would have been a fool not to have kept the camera trained on her every second. She's a dynamo! Members of the film’s cast may have felt slighted, and fans of the stage show may cry foul, but in my book, if Bye Bye Birdie is remembered at all today, it’s due in large part to Ann-Margret. The material is just too ordinary as it is. She is camp, a little over the top, and perhaps artificial as hell, but she is blessed with that indefinable something that makes it near-impossible for you to watch anyone else when she's on the screen. She’s a star.

In the Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie paid tribute to iconic, stone-faced TV host Ed Sullivan  in the song, "Hymn for a Sunday Evening." Director George Sidney snagged the genuine article for the film (that's him on the left, for all of you youngsters).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There aren't many lines across which the life experiences of gays and straights of my generation intersect, but one thing that many males (and a good many females) my age have in common—regardless of sexual orientation—is the memory of their first time seeing Ann-Margret singing the film’s title song. Whether we saw it on the big screen in full color or in black and white on our TV sets, like the Moon Landing, few of us ever forgot or recovered from that image. Wow!

At the start of the film, Ann-Margret's performance of "Bye Bye Birdie" is girlish and plaintive. When she reprises the song at the end of the film, her performance has become assured, teasing, and not a little sexually aggressive.

The fifties had Marilyn Monroe standing over that subway grate, but we children of the sixties had Ann-Margret on that treadmill. A sequence so obviously tame, perhaps it's a testament to our nation's level of sexual repression at the time that Ann-Margret, in those few short minutes at the start and end of the film, made men, women, children, straights, gays, lesbians, and adolescents of all stripes fall in love/lust with her.
The first time I saw Bye Bye Birdie was in black & white on late-night TV. I remember being just thunderstruck (I'm positive my jaw dropped open). I'd never seen anything like her! Advancing and retreating against that endless void, wind machine a-blowing...Ann-Margret was nothing less than a celluloid Venus emergent.

The dancer assuming the puppy hands pose with Bobby Rydell here is Lorene Yarnell, 
who found fame in the '70s as half of the popular mime duo, Shields and Yarnell.

The blonde staring agog at Jesse Pearson is '70s TV personality and Match Game stalwart, Elaine Joyce. Pearson himself would go on to write and direct porn films in the '70s until his untimely passing in 1979 at the age of 49. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As I've stated, Bye Bye Birdie is one of my favorite movie musicals, but primarily due to its songs, musical sequences, and the rapturous presence of Ann-Margret. I have no complaint with anyone in the cast except to say that they're sorely ill-served by the weak script and they're all goners when it comes to having to share any scenes with Miss You-Know-Who. Predictably, I'm finding that the older I get the more certain aspects of the film seem to strike me as charmingly camp or comically dated. Some of these things are fun: the middle-class suburban milieu, the fashions, all those rotary phones. Other things less so: the all-white cast, that Shriner's Ballet when it starts to get out of hand (the 2009 Broadway revival removed the number entirely claiming, in the words of its star Gina Gershon, "It seemed a little too gang rape-y").

Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye
When I saw Bye Bye Birdie on the big screen for the first time in the 80s, the film's biggest laugh came from the intentional misunderstanding of this sweet, totally innocent lyric. 

So whether enjoyed as camp, escapism, or an idealized journey to a past that never existed, Bye Bye Birdie is, at 50-years, still the most fun-filled musical around. And best of all, it has Ann-Margret!

This great caricature is the work of Pete Emslie

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

DORIAN GRAY 1970

Playwright Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in 1890), has been adapted to film at least ten times, not counting several silent versions and numerous movies made for television. Of these, I've seen a kind of low-rent, Dark Shadows-esque version produced by Dan Curtis in 1973; a visually well-turned-out and significantly altered 2009 British theatrical adaptation for the Twilight generation; and the uniformly excellent 1945 film version which boasts George Sanders playing what is essentially Addison DeWitt five years before there was an Addison DeWitt.

Each film possesses its own unique assortment of assets and liabilities, but by no stretch of the imagination could any be labeled the definitive translation of Wilde's allegory of the corporeal vs. the spiritual. So, being that as far as I know, the definitive adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray has yet to be made, I proffer this, my absolute favorite version of Wilde's oft-told-tale: the irresistibly loopy Dorian Gray - 1970. It is a film that stands head and shoulders above the rest for its appealingly tawdry Eurotrash aesthetics, flawless evocation of Swinging '60s mod, and its flagrant, unabashed sleaze factor.

Loaded with entertainment value every bit as visually exquisite and shallow as its protagonist, Dorian Gray (titled The Secret of Dorian Gray or The Evils of Dorian Gray in Europe) is a deliciously prurient Italian/German collaboration produced by American schlockmeister Samuel Z. Arkoff (the "brains" behind virtually every Beach Party or outlaw motorcycle gang movie made in the '60s) and released through his American International Pictures.

Helmut Berger as Dorian Gray

Herbert Lom as Henry Wotton 

Marie Liljedahl as Sybil Vane / Gladys Mormouth

Richard Todd as Basil Hallward

Margaret Lee as Gwendolyn Wotton

Directed by onetime Sergio Leone cinematographer Massimo Dallamano, Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's Victorian Gothic provocatively updated to Swinging Sixties London at the peak of the Sexual Revolution. It remains reasonably faithful to the novel's Faustian plot concerning a handsome young innocent --led down the path of hedonism and debauchery-- whose portrait comes to reflect the decay of his soul, while he himself remains the unsullied ideal of youth and beauty. This Dorian Gray is, in every and all aspects, a Dorian Gray that could only have come out of the late '60s.

Mac Daddy Dorian

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

There is something conceptually so perfect about positing Dorian Gray smack in the middle of the youth-obsessed '60s. Removed from the wholesale repression and prudery of Victorian-era morality, this particular incarnation proposes what seems to me to be a far more compelling question: When arbitrary ethical judgments of good and bad are replaced with the freedom to do what one wishes in a world that worships self-fulfillment, beauty, youth, and living for today, of what authentic value is a moral code?

In the year this film was released, folk rocker Stephen Stills had a Top 20 hit with a song whose lyrics espoused the then-popular "free-love" philosophy: "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." (Which in itself is a retooling of an E.Y. Harburg lyric from a song from the 1947 Broadway musical, Finian's Rainbow: "If I'm not near the girl I love, I love the girl I'm near.”) The timbre of the times literally reflected the philosophy of Dorian Gray's Hedononist-in-Chief, Henry Wotton: life is to be enjoyed freely and openly, and youth is a briefly bestowed gift best utilized to its fullest while one possesses it.

Prince Charming and Juliet
Prior to embarking on a long-term love affair with himself, Dorian falls into
idealized love with virginal (albeit not for long) aspiring actress Sybil Vane

The '60s atmosphere of moral relativism would seem to suggest that this particular incarnation of Dorian Gray was perhaps conceived as a means of addressing Oscar Wilde's themes in a manner relevant to the changing times. An opportunity to reflect upon what distinctions exist, if any, between being liberated and being a libertine. Alas, from the film's first Giallo-influenced frames (Giallo being a stylized genre of Italian thriller), it's clear that this Dorian Gray is less interested in exploring the complex themes of aestheticism vs. morality so much as exploring how far the newly relaxed standards of cinema censorship can be pressed into the service of chronicling Dorian's heretofore only-hinted-at depravities and sins of the flesh.

Desire Under the Elms

PERFORMANCES
Italian cinema's long history of dubbing and post-synching dialog frequently makes it tough to access actors' performances. Dorian Gray's multi-national cast speaks its dialogue in English, but the entire film is dubbed by other actors (save for Herbert Lom, who provides his own voice). This might spare audiences the sometimes ear-gnarling clash of dueling accents you get with many international productions, but it also tends to rob performances of a great deal of their vitality. This is especially true of the dynamic and charismatic Helmut Berger, who possesses a sexy, melodic voice and whose charming Teutonic lisp (he's Austrian, actually) I greatly miss.

Action films and mostly-silent spaghetti westerns fare better under this practice, but a dialogue-heavy film like this — with its attempts at Wilde-ishly witty banter — makes for a particularly clumsy aural experience. The effect of all these somewhat flat, disembodied voices is that already dodgy performances are rendered thoroughly ineffectual (I'm sorry, but lovely Marie Liljedahl seems like a pretty awful actress in any language), and potentially good performances (Berger, Isa Miranda, Renato Romano) are de-fanged and neutered. In its place is a form of acting I tend to associate with those Hammer horror films from the '60s: underlined and over-indicated to the point of pantomime.

"Do you want to sell it, Mr. Gray?"
In a minute, randy millionairess Patricia Ruxton (Isa Miranda) 
will make it obscenely clear she isn't talking about real estate

Happily, Dorian Gray, having been fashioned as an erotic exploitation film from the get-go, isn't really a film fueled by its performances. Like a trash novel by Sidney Sheldon or Jacqueline Susann (fans of Valley of the Dolls would love this), Dorian Gray is a movie devoted to surface gloss. And on that score - from its photogenic cast, sumptuous color photography, lavish locations, outrageous mod costuming, and climate of glamorized sleaze - Dorian Gray more than delivers.

Tearoom for Two
Dorian Gray, Sexual Outlaw

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A hurdle for any screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the casting of a Dorian whose looks correspond to enough people's wildly subjective notions of male beauty so as not to render the narrative absurd, or at the very least, puzzling. For my money, director Dallamano hits pay dirt with the casting of Helmut Berger. A man so staggeringly beautiful that he makes personal fave Joe Dallesandro (certainly one of the most gorgeous men to have ever walked the planet) look like Ernest Borgnine.

Something not possible in earlier adaptations, contemporary Dorian Gray becomes a porn star!

Protégé and life partner of director Lucino Visconti, Berger appeared prominently for the director in The Damned, Ludwig, and Conversation Piece. Dubbed by the press at the time as the most beautiful man in the world, Helmut, smooth, slim, and marvelously devoid of tattoos, was like the Richard Gere/Ewan McGregor of his day: he couldn't keep his clothes on.
In the '70s, female stars were jumping out of their clothing in record numbers, but one had to rely almost exclusively on Andy Warhol-produced Paul Morrissey films to catch male nudity of any consequence. Lucky for us connoisseurs of male pulchritude, Helmut Berger obligingly doffed his trousers in film after film. A fact that certainly leaves me wondering to what degree my affinity for this film is tied to the filmmakers taking every opportunity to feature our leading man in various states of undress. I'll have to think about that.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Someone once said, "Everyone has trash, but what distinguishes us is the quality of our trash," (it sounds like something John Waters would say). I apply this philosophy to my taste in movies. I'm well aware that a great many of the films I get the biggest kick out of are films many would perceive as pure cinema trash, but there's not a soul in the world who could convince me that my particular brand of trash isn't some of the most superior trash you're likely to come across. It's often the very best that the worst has to offer.

The striking actress Beryl Cunningham portrays Adrienne, Dorian's amoral partner-in-blackmail

In Dorian Gray, you have the typical youth-directed sexploitation stuff American International released with assembly-line regularity in the '60s and '70s (Three in the Attic, Angel, Angel, Down We Go), only this time cloaked in the veil of literary significance. In most aspects superficial (those centering on the libidinous exploits of Dorian), the film does right by its conceit in updating the tale to modern times. But it fails to go much below the surface in examining even a fraction of the ideas and concepts its premise suggests.
Curiously, it's the passing of time which has granted Dorian Gray the subtextual gravity it lacked in 1970. Albeit perhaps, uncomfortably.

Actor Helmut Berger has gone on record about his disdain for Los Angeles and Hollywood, and has thus, outside of a small part in The Godfather: Part III and a year's penance on TV's Dynasty in 1983, mostly worked in Europe. High living (literally...drug and alcohol abuse) eventually got the better of him, and like Marlon Brando, that other physical specimen who ceased to care for maintaining a youthful appearance for the comfort of his fans, Helmut did the unspeakable...he allowed himself to age naturally.

Renato Romano portrays Dorian's boyhood friend, Alan Campbell, a chemist

Certainly his current condition is to some degree a result of youthful excesses, but at almost 70 years of age, part is merely due to a thing that has become increasingly rare among public figures: actual aging. A phenomenon practically unheard of in Hollywood, our culture reveres beauty so completely that an individual who allows his looks to "go" is considered more a figure of pity than one who pathetically clings to eternal youth.
Personally, I find Helmut Berger's current relaxed-into-himself countenance very refreshing, and it speaks of a self-image perhaps a good deal healthier than the plastic-surgery nightmares that proliferate in Hollywood today. I've read many online comments about how sad it is that Berger has failed to maintain his looks as he ages, but little speculation along the lines of how he might be happier and more at peace with himself now than in his cocaine-thin days.

Helmut Berger in his 60s  /  Berger at 25 

The questions about inner vs. outer beauty that Oscar Wilde dramatized so artfully years ago (and if you've never read The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I heartily recommend it) are still with us... maybe now more than ever. In our looks-obsessed culture in which beauty is so often seen as a virtue, is youth really a thing worth trying to hold onto forever, prizing it above all? And what value does beauty have to the possessor (we on the outside benefit from gazing upon it) if there's not also peace of mind? It's a pity that Dorian Gray, an exploitation film distracted by its own sensationalism, failed to delve deeper into the many questions raised by its enduringly appealing premise.

But take a look at the film now, through the prism of 43 years having passed. Like a real-life Dorian Gray, Helmut Berger in this movie provides a record of himself in a state of near-perfect youth. A moving portrait frozen, unchanging, and captured on film for all time. Knowing now what we couldn't have known in 1970 (what ultimately becomes of Helmut's celebrated beauty, his battles with drugs and alcoholism, and the toll they take on his face, body, and mind) raises the very issues Oscar Wilde's novel proposed all those years ago, and makes us question our own attitudes about beauty, aging, and the value we place upon such things.

"The world belongs to the young and beautiful," Wotton tells Dorian. Perhaps that's true. But it's ownership with a very short lease. Beauty is indeed something, but it's sobering to ponder, when considering Helmut Berger's troubled life and how little peace his good looks brought him, how obviously beauty isn't everything.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2013

THE STERILE CUCKOO 1969

Before I saw The Sterile Cuckoo in 1969, I had only the vaguest impression of Liza Minnelli. I had a dim memory of her as this somewhat hyperactive, inauthentic personality who popped up occasionally on her mother’s variety TV show, and another as an over-earnest Red Riding Hood in a 1965 musical TV special titled The Dangerous Christmas of Little Red Riding Hood. Having missed her film debut in the 1967 Albert Finney vehicle Charlie Bubbles, The Sterile Cuckoo marked my first encounter with Liza Minnelli, the actress, and, in the character of Pookie Adams, my first exposure to what eventually evolved into Liza Minnelli, the screen persona.

Liza Minnelli as Mary Ann "Pookie" Adams

Wendell Burton as Jerry Payne

The Sterile Cuckoo, the first film effort by late director Alan J. Pakula (Klute, Starting Over) is a fairly straightforward, bittersweet tale of first love presented as a touching, coming-of-age character study. Soft-spoken biology major Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton) encounters bespectacled oddball Pookie Adams (Liza Minnelli) as both are waiting for a bus to take them to their first semesters at neighboring colleges. The extroverted but socially awkward Pookie, who either misinterprets Jerry's passive malleability as interest or willfully disregards what is more apt to be amused indifference, insists that the two have instantly bonded and share a mutual attraction ("We got along terrifically on the bus!" she asserts).

Pookie, an outcast who aggressively overcompensates and guards her lonely vulnerability behind the labeling of others as “creeps,” “weirdos,” or “bad eggs,” is clearly drawn to the nice, button-down sweetness of the biology major, but one senses that she's a type that habitually latches onto strangers. For his part, the overwhelmed Jerry doesn't so much warm to Pookie’s charms as succumbs to the force of her persistent will.

Pookie worms her way into yet another heart

Yet in that strange way in which a relationship is often forged from an individual of somewhat amorphous character being drawn/surrendering to the superficially dominant character of another; the very dissimilar Pookie and Jerry embark upon a swift but tenuous romance. Taking place over the course of one school year, The Sterile Cuckoo follows the couple’s evolution and eventual dissolution as Jerry begins to grow into himself just as Pookie’s love-starved neediness starts to reveal itself to be part of larger, more deeply rooted emotional problems.

Tim McIntire plays Jerry's roommate Charles Schumacher (or Shoonover...the film can't seem to make up its mind), a typically macho, hard-drinkin' fratboy given to an excess of sexual braggadocio. On the surface. The reality of this ostensibly "popular" character's life underscore The Sterile Cuckoo's theme that all teens struggle to find their identities. Pookie's self-absorbed wallowing in her own problems blinds her to an awareness of  the feelings of others. 

As a 12-year-old kid enamored of too-mature films I scarcely understood, The Sterile Cuckoo was one of the few movies I saw during this period that didn't feel like a two-hour excursion into the uncharted territory of mysterious adulthood. Although the characters are supposed to be 18 or 19, the issues plaguing Pookie and Jerry (friendships, identity, loneliness, peer group acceptance) were, for the most part, things to which I could both relate and recognize within myself. I identified with Jerry’s timidity and deliberate, watchful approach to others. Likewise, as a gay youth, I empathized both with Pookie’s perception of herself as an outsider and her reject-them-before-they-reject-you, knee-jerk defense mechanisms.

The painful paradox of finding yourself snubbed by the very group you profess to have no interest in being a part of is brought to almost excruciating life by Minnelli in this scene at a campus hangout. Hoping to have found someone with whom she can share her outcast isolation, Pookie is unnerved to discover that Jerry, by all appearances a quiet loner, is actually rather socially poised and liked by others.

But what I think I responded to most was the film’s insight into the dynamics of a relationship between two loner personalities drawn together in their isolation. Both Pookie and Jerry are insecure, but each responds to their circumstances differently. Pookie’s insecurity causes her to alienate all others except the one person she selects to smother with all the love she has, all the while emotionally draining them with demands for all the love she needs. Jerry lacks confidence as well, but as his insecurity is neither fear-based nor self-defensive, he's capable of recognizing that most everyone is a little afraid to reach out to others, and that what matters is that one make a little effort.
Unlike the offensive message behind the beloved 1978 musical Grease, whose moral is to encourage teenage girls to change everything about themselves in order to gain peer acceptance, The Sterile Cuckoo is not a film about the need to conform... it's about the inevitability of growing up.

"Pookie, maybe they aren't all so bad. Maybe everybody's just a little cautious of everybody."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Always a sucker for movies about vulnerable characters (and movies that make me cry), I fell in love with The Sterile Cuckoo and saw it about six times back in 1969. It sold me on Liza Minnelli as a genuinely talented actress, and inspired me to read the surprisingly different-in-tone John Nichols novel. For the longest time I harbored a memory of The Sterile Cuckoo as just a sad/funny look at first love, and perhaps that’s all it's intended to be. But seeing the film today, in light of all we've come to learn about mental illness (coupled with our culture’s obsession with medicating all idiosyncrasies out of the human personality); I’m struck by how seriously disturbed Pookie seems to me now. That certainly wasn't the case when I was young. She starts out as some kind of early exemplar of the Manic Pixie Girl cliché, but what with her self-delusions, pathological lying, death-obsession, mood swings, and crippling persecution complex, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Pookie is considerably more than just a wounded misfit in search of someone to love her.

Death-fixated Pookie likes to hang out in cemeteries

PERFORMANCES

Liza Minnelli deservedly won an Oscar nomination for her intense and deeply committed performance in The Sterile Cuckoo. Cynics and the industry savvy might take issue and label such an ostentatiously underdog role as Pookie Adams--significantly altered and made more sympathetic (pathetic?) than in the novel--to be just the sort of calculated Oscar-bait to attract Academy attention. But given that a similar gambit didn't work for Shirley MacLaine that same year for what many consider to be an equally manipulative and maudlin turn in Sweet Charity; I think it’s fair to say that Minnelli put this one over in spite of Pakula’s and screenwriter Alvin Sargent’s (Paper Moon, Ordinary People) determination to stack the emotional deck so heavily in her favor.

The character of Pookie Adams was conceived for the screen as one far more tragic than depicted in the novel.  

It’s popular to dismiss the less-showy work of newcomer Wendell Burton in the reactive, relatively thankless role of Jerry Payne, but I think his low-key naturalism and likability provide the perfect contrast to the nervous hyperactivity of Minnelli’s character (it’s impossible to watch her Pookie Adams and not think of Anne Hathaway's legendary eagerness to please). His character’s subtle growth is very well played, and to Burton’s credit, he’s never wiped off the screen by Minnelli (no easy feat, that). At the time of The Sterile Cuckoo's release, Burton appeared poised for stardom. But after next appearing in an almost identical role as a soft-spoken prison inmate in Fortune & Men’s Eyes (1971) he worked primarily in TV before retiring from acting in the late 1980s.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Earlier I mentioned how The Sterile Cuckoo marked my introduction to Liza Minnelli, the screen persona. By this I mean that for all intents and purposes, one can find the genesis of the entirety of Liza Minnelli's adapted screen persona in The Sterile Cuckoo’s Pookie Adams. Nowhere is this more obvious than in its similarities to her Oscar-winning role in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1971). Fans of that film are apt to recognize in Pookie Adams a nascent version of Sally Bowles.
Pookie & Sally: A Comparison

1. Both sport waifish, gamine bobs.
2. Both mask their inherent insecurity behind displays of delusional self-confidence. 

3. Both win over reluctant, passive men through the sheer force of their personalities.

4. Both suffer from neglectful fathers.
5. Each has a big emotional breakdown scene that virtually screams, “Give that girl an Oscar!”
6. Both have pregnancy scares.

7. Both have gaydar issues. Pookie thinks (perhaps correctly) that Jerry’s roommate is gay, while Sally fails to detect that her boyfriend and her lover are bisexual.
8. Both wind up scaring off their lovers.

Come-on: Would you like to peel a tomato?

Come-on: "Doesn't my body drive you wild with desire?"

The Sterile Cuckoo (top) and Cabaret (bottom) share scenes of Liza Minnelli as the sexual aggressor. Here she attempts to seduce lookalike males with her supine figure.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The Sterile Cuckoo is one of those forgotten movies in need of rediscovery. It’s more character-based than story-driven, so it's not heavy on plot; Pookie’s character can prove more annoying than poignant to some; and if you take a dislike to the film’s Oscar-nominated theme song “Come Saturday Morning,” you’re likely to be sent screaming into the streets, for it comprises the totality of the film’s soundtrack. But to me, it’s a perfectly wonderful film of humor, sensitivity, and considerable emotional insight. Beautifully shot and an authentic-feeling record of the late '60s, The Sterile Cuckoo has standout performances throughout (Minnelli is at times phenomenal in this), and I think the conveyance of the brief romance is beautifully handled...both its beginning and its painful end. Definitely worth a look.
Oh, and as to the significance of the title? Nowhere to be found in the film (allegedly cut), but referenced in the novel as a poem Pookie writes about herself.

At the start of the film, we don't understand the silence between the two characters sitting on a bench waiting for the arrival of a bus. When this image is echoed at the end, we have a better understanding of the pattern of Pookie's life and a sense that this has been-- and will continue to be--a scenario she'll play out again and again.

Mark, at Random Ramblings, Thoughts & Fiction and a few Internet friends have all shared with me tales of having had encounters with a real-life Pookie Adams, so I figured I should share my own.
My particular Pookie was a bit of an outcast, wore glasses, and was ragingly funny. She was keenly perceptive and cutting when it came to the shortcomings of others, yet oblivious to her own. She was a deeply loyal friend, but somewhat suffocating in that if you were her friend, you had to be only HER friend. There was no room for anybody else. She was happiest in having the two of us share all of our time together sitting apart from others and putting them down. In my own insecurity, this felt for a time like a kind of strength to me, too, but it wasn't long before I recognized what a self-defeating, one-way street this attitude was. We were an insulated, impregnable world of two, but it was a world of cowards. As much as I enjoyed her company, the ultimately toxic nature of her mean-spirited humor (it was so obvious that she was in pain and so afraid of others) drove us apart.  I see in The Sterile Cuckoo and Liza Minnelli's excellent performance an exacting depiction of a certain kind of wounded personality. One I'm learning is not as unique as I'd once thought.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 -2013