Thursday, April 24, 2014

STRAIT-JACKET 1964

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small!" – Norma Desmond - Sunset Blvd.

That oft-quoted Gloria Swanson line has endured because it conveys so much Classic Hollywood truth. At least, it's true in the case of Joan Crawford. The Oscar-winning actress (with a capital-A) dubbedwith equal parts admiration and castigation"The Ultimate Movie Star" of Hollywood's Golden Age, who saw her decades-long status as the last of the grande dames of the silver screen flounder as the larger-than-life scale of motion pictures shrunk to the size of a TV set. 
Getting kicked by Bette Davis in the anteroom of a decaying Hollywood mansion in 1962s, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was Crawford's last onscreen pairing with anyone even remotely able to keep in pace with her particular brand of old-school star wattage. Following that, every film role and episodic TV appearance only seemed to emphasize the Brobdingnagian degree to which the 5'5" actress towered over her second-rate material and dwarfed the lilliputian talents of her co-stars and directors.
Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin (close-ups like this don't just happen, folks)
Diane Baker as Carol Harbin
George Kennedy as Leo Krause
John Anthony Hayes as Michael Fields
There's no denying that Joan Crawford was an actress given to theatrically histrionic excesses and a to-the-manner-born camera hog prone to mannered, over-stylized gestures and gimmicks that morphed over time into camp and self-parody. And sure, the severe, mannish extremes of her late-career physical appearance lamentably coincided with an accelerating artificiality and lack of concern for subtlety in her acting (which wasn't all that subtle to begin with) that caused her to come across more like a haughty female impersonator than one of the great beauties of Hollywood's Golden Age. But, however one may feel about Crawford, it's difficult to imagine anyone thinking the star of Mildred Pierce and A Woman's Face deserved the likes of William Castle; a charming, obviously sweet-natured guy, but arguably one of the most pedestrian movie directors ever to hoist a megaphone.
Rochelle Hudson and Leif Erickson as Emily and Bill Cutler
You'd think, what with my being such a devotee of entertainingly bad movies, I'd number myself among those who regard William  "King of the Bs" Castle as some kind of patron saint of schlock. I certainly can attest to having my favorites (those being: Strait-Jacket, Homicidal, and I Saw What You Did). And I even concede that the worst of them are often so inoffensively lightweight that they somehow manage to be curiously entertaining. If not always quite bearable. But beyond having a nose for bizarre and offbeat material, Castle has always struck me as a bit middle-of-the-road in his approach. He lacked the elemental vulgarity necessary for creating truly epic bad films. Something about him always seemed too bland and suburban, perhaps too decent or too sane, to ever really go to the dark places the topics of his films suggested.
William Castle was a showman, a producer, and an inveterate huckster. But as a director, he appeared to have no demons to exorcise, no overarching ambitions to surmount, and wholly lacking that spark of neurotic lunacy that made the films of directors like Ed Wood (Plan 9 From Outer Space), Bert I. Gordon (Attack of the Puppet People), and his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, so compelling...and weird. In fact, one of my chief frustrations with William Castle films is the nagging certainty that all of his movies would have been vastly improved had Castle stuck to producing, and had somehow been prohibited from directing them himself. (See: Rosemary's Baby).
When I was growing up, Joan Crawford's name was synonymous with B-horror movies. It was years before I knew her from anything other than Berserk, Trog, Strait-Jacket, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 

And while I maintain that an actress of Joan Crawford's reputation didn't deserve a director as mediocre as William Castle, there's also little question in my mind that, at this particular stage in her career, Joan Crawford (and her ego) desperately needed a director like William Castle. He respected her legacy and star status and tried to do her justice...in his own bargain-basement way. Indeed, from everything I've read, Castle was so beside himself at having actually landed a bonafide movie star for one of his on-a-shoestring horror opuses (blowsy Joan Blondell had initially been cast in Strait-Jacket) that he treated Crawford in a manner more befitting her days as MGM's reigning boxoffice darling than as the star of secondary roles in The Best of Everything (1959) and The Caretakers (1963).

Obsequiously conceding to her every whim (approval over script, cast, and cameraman; 15% participation in profits; hefty Pepsi-Cola product placement), Castle gave Joan her first sole leading-lady role since 1957s The Story of Esther Costello. So what if it was in another derivative, cut-rate homage/ripoff in Castle's tireless (tiresome) quest to duplicate Alfred Hitchcock's career? At least Joan and her falsies didn't have to compete with Bette Davis for camera time.
For Those Who Think Young
Crawford, "Star of the First Magnitude" and Pepsi-Cola Board of  Directors member,
was not above a bit of old-fashioned hucksterism

An original screenplay penned by Psycho's Robert Bloch, Strait-Jacket casts Crawford as rural hotbox Lucy Harbin ("Very much a woman, and very much aware of the fact"). First glimpsed in a 1944 flashback through a Vaseline haze we'll come to grow progressively more familiar with, 57-year-old Crawford (unconvincingly) plays 25-year-old Lucy as a superannuated Sadie Thompson driven to murder when she catches her faithless 2nd husband (Rock Hudson protégée Lee Majors making his film debut) in bed with another woman (Patricia Crest). Seizing upon a nearby axe as her weapon of choice, luckless Lucy is nevertheless favored with a rare crime of passion twofer: the raven-haired honky-tonk homewrecker lying next to her husband obligingly lies quietly, patiently awaiting her turn until after Lucy has completed vigorously bisecting her hubby's head from his bare-chested torso.
From the repeated, wild-eyed hacks taken at the now literally separated lovers, it's clear Lucy has been driven crackers by the night's events and is soon carted off to the funny farm wearing the film's titular item of clothing. But no matter how unfortunate Lucy's timing, winning by a landslide in the "worst evening ever" sweepstakes is Lucy's 6-year-old daughter Carol, whose world-class kindertrauma encompasses being left alone in a desolate farmhouse while her father barhops; being awakened by said father and local floozy, who then proceed to make out in front of her without benefit of a closed door. Finally, to have it all capped off by bearing witness to her axe-wielding mother going postal on the lovers while dressed in a garish, floral-print dress, cacophonous Auntie Mame charm bracelets, and tacky, ankle-strap shoes. It's up for grabs which was more horrific for the poor child, the bloody murder, or her mother's fashion sense. 
Vicki Cos as young Carol Harbin
Diane Baker wasn't required to play Carol as a child, but it's up for debate as to whether 25-year-old Baker would have made a more convincing 6-year-old than Crawford does a 25-year-old

Jump ahead twenty years: Carol is a lovely, well-adjusted (?), budding sculptress living on a farm with her uncle and aunt (Leif Erickson and Rochelle Hudson), about to embark on a new life with her rich fiance-to-be (John Anthony Hayes). The only monkey wrench in the works is that her mother, who has been institutionalized all these years, is scheduled for release. Will it be "I Love Lucy Harbin" or "The Snake Pit: Country Style"? Any way you cut it (heh-heh), the stage has been set for a doozy of a family reunion.
Ethel Mertz: "Are you insinuating that I'm daft, loony, off my rocker, out of my head?"
Fred Mertz: "Well, that covers it pretty well... ."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Two words: Joan Crawford. For fans of over-the-top Joan (that would be: everybody) who heretofore have had to content themselves with brief-but-welcome snippets of unbridled ham popping up in otherwise reined-in performances held in precarious check by watchful directors, Strait-Jacketto use the hyperbole of old-movie publicitygives you Joan Crawford as you want to see her…the Joan Crawford you love…the Joan Crawford whose take-no-prisoners approach to acting and total disregard for the performance rhythms of her co-stars sets the screen ablaze with the fiery passions of a woman's dangerous desires.
Smokin'
You'll never convince me that a director as uninspired as William Castle had anything to do with Joan Crawford's performance in Strait-Jacket. Hers is a performance culled from hours of self-directed rehearsals and meticulous attention paid to doing "something" every single moment the camera is pointed at her. In fact, to hear co-star Diane Baker tell it, Crawford was, for all intents and purposes, the director of Strait-Jacket; everything she wanted, she got. And for that, you won't hear me complaining. Without Crawford, Strait-Jacket would be as sluggish as most of Castle's other films, and indeed, all scenes in this film that don't include Crawford prove to be inert, exposition-heavy sequences shot in the bland "alking heads in medium shot" style of television.  
Pepsi-Cola Vice-President of PR, Mitchell Cox as Dr. Anderson
Maybe it was the contractually-mandated ice-cold sets she insisted upon (biographers have stated this was as much for makeup and skin concerns as keeping her energy up), or the vodka she laced her Pepsi with, but Crawford's scenes are substantially more "spirited" than anything else in the film. No wonder--outside of promotional cardboard axes handed out to theater patrons when it opened--Strait-Jacket is one of the few William Castle productions released without one of his trademark gimmicks. Who needs gimmicks when you have Joan Crawford?
Now, how did that get there?
PERFORMANCES
Evoking Charles Dickens' antithetical quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Strait-Jacket is one of Joan Crawford's worst films, yet strangely, also one of her best. Crawford is one of my favorite actresses, and with each new (old) film I discover, my appreciation and admiration for her grows. There's not another actor I can think of who is quite so good when they're bad. The joys to be had in watching Strait-Jacket is seeing Joan, the terrific actress, going mano-a-mano against Joan, the free-range ham.
Crawford is rather remarkable in being able to wrest genuine sympathy and pathos out of the sketchily-drawn character of Lucy Harbin. She does some of the finest acting of her career in the sequence in which she gazes at the youthful image of herself sculpted by her daughter (actually sculpted by artist Yucca Salamunich on the set of A Woman's Face in 1941). She's touching and very effective in conveying the character's melancholy and regret over the years lost and beauty faded. She completely outclasses the film in the sequence. As many biographers have suggested, had Strait-Jacket not so obviously worn the stamp of being a Z-grade exploitationer, the more quiet aspects of Crawford's performance (the early, post-asylum scenes are wonderful) would surely have been looked upon more favorably by critics.
On the polar-opposite end of the subtlety spectrum is the sequence that fans of over-the-top camp have made into Strait-Jacket's setpiece. In it, Joan's character undergoes a transformation akin to demonic possession when she gets a makeover that has her trussed up in clothes and makeup identical to that which she wore 20 years earlier. Guarded and hesitant before, Lucy instantly reverts to her (presumably) old ways and turns a polite meet-and-greet with her daughter's handsome fiance into the 1964 equivalent of a lap dance. 
The sight of a grotesquely-made-up Joan Crawford turning her man-trap wiles on a man young enough to be her son is more terrifying than anything Castle was able to accomplish with his fake-looking axe murders. In the 2002 book Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography, the authors state that Joan was quite taken with the good looks of actor John Anthony Hayes, and in response to an admiring comment made by someone alluding to Hayes mainly acting with his lips, Crawford is quoted as replying, "Yes, and such sexy lips, too!" All of which goes to set up, if not exactly explain, why Crawford's unique method of (wholly improvised) seduction during this sequence involves feeling about the actor's mouth like a Braille student and practically shoving her entire hand down his throat. Sexy.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
"Spot the Real-Life Parallels" is a game that adds zest to the viewing of any Joan Crawford film.
The Neatness Thing
"Is that the way you're going to do it?"
Judgmental Joan: No matter how hard you try, you know you'll never quite measure up
Daughter Issues
Joan always knew where to find the boys AND the booze
"Tina!! Bring me the axe!!"
"If she doesn't like you...she can make you disappear."


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I've never fully understood why so many "bad" movies outdistance more accomplished films when it comes to sheer entertainment value, so perhaps that's why I treasure them so much. With boring and banal being the most frequent by-product of professional ineptitude, there's something serendipitous about discovering...what can you call it...the perfect "hot mess" that is an enjoyably bad movie.
Meeting the In-Laws
Edith Atwater and Howard St. John as Alison &Raymond Fields
Strait-Jacket is a veritable laundry list of filmmaking flaws: a terrible, ill-used music score; bland performances (although I really like Diane Baker and George Kennedy); unsure pacing; flat cinematography, and editing that appears calculated to enhance the artificiality of the violence; a cliche-filled script; and no distinct visual style beyond "Make sure they can see it" and "Make sure it's in focus." Yet it's a movie I can watch repeatedly and still find new things to enjoy. The breeziest 93-minutes of film you're likely to see. Of course, the one-of-a-kind force of nature known as Joan Crawford accounts for 90% of this.
But whether you watch Strait-Jacket for the talent or the travesty, it remains a movie that doesn't disappoint. If nothing else, it's a marvelous example of the kind of movies being offered big-time stars as the pictures started to get smaller.
Watch Your Step, indeed!

BONUS MATERIAL
The absolutely delightful "How to Plan a Movie Murder" featurette for Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford, William Castle, and screenwriter Robert Bloch: HERE

Diane Baker enjoyed a good relationship with Joan Crawford. She appeared with the actress in The Best of Everything and Strait-Jacket. Still, according to Baker, that relationship soured during the making of Della (originally titled Fatal Confinement) an unsold 1964 pilot for a Paul Burke TV series called Royal Bay

Joan Crawford's wardrobe & makeup tests for Strait-Jacket HERE

1982 Interview with Steven Spielberg on working with Joan on Night Gallery HERE

Strait-Jacket opened in New York on Wednesday, January 22, 1964. First-nighters were treated to a personal appearance by Joan Crawford and co-star John Anthony Hayes. 


Pure William Castle
The Columbia Lady loses her head


Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

Monday, March 31, 2014

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE 1962


If prostitution didn’t exist, Hollywood most certainly would have had to invent it. How else to surmount the troubling obstacle presented to screenwriters stymied by the notion of a female character not defined by the title of wife, mother, or girlfriend? How else to include as much sex, salaciousness, and female objectification as possible while still tent-poling the dual obligations of censor-mandated moralizing and have-your-cake-and-eat-too self-righteous finger-wagging? Both necessary to placate guilty audiences.
America loves its sex, violence, and debauchery, but never really lets itself enjoy the fun it has rolling around in the gutter unless also afforded the opportunity to give itself a good slap on the wrist after it’s all over. This need to have one’s "sensitive adult material" served up with a healthy dose of religious dogma goes a long way toward explaining why a moralizing piece of Hollywood sleaze like Walk on the Wild Side is such an enduringly entertaining hoot. 
Laurence Harvey as Doug Linkhorn
Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist (nee Tristram)
Capucine as Hallie Gerard
Barbara Stanwyck as Jo Courtney
Anne Baxter as Teresina Vidaverri
Published in 1956, Nelson Algren’s anecdotal, relentlessly downbeat, essentially unfilmable (at least in 1962) Depression-era novel A Walk on the Wild Side bears little resemblance to the sanitized motion picture it became. Rumored (rather remarkably) to be the result of no less than six screenwriters, including  playwright Clifford Odets (The Country Girl) and screenwriter Ben Hecht (Spellbound); the film adaptation strives to be a tale of lost souls searching for redemption through love on the sordid side of the streets of New Orleans. But for director Edward Dmytryk and his half-dozen writers, trying to balance sexual candor and social uplift obviously proved to be a burden far too cumbersome. For all their efforts to be bold and daring, in the end, Walk on the Wild Side (a film promoted with the self-serving warning “This is an ADULT PICTURE - Parents should exercise discretion in permitting the immature to see it”) wound up being just another glossy Hollywood soap opera.
The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's major conflict 

The time is the 1930s (you’ll just have to take the filmmakers’ word for that), the place is Arroyo, Texas. Following the death of his long-ailing father, lovesick farmboy Dove Linkhorn  (Lithuanian-born Laurence Harvey) decides to travel to Louisiana to find his childhood sweetheart, Hallie Gerard (French-born Capucine). Hallie is an amateur painter and sculptress who left behind Dove and his alcoholic father for a taste of life, real and raw, outside of dust-bowl Texas.
On route to Louisiana , Doug crosses paths with savvy runaway orphan Kitty Twist (Fonda) who teaches the greenhorn yokel the tricks of riding the rails and thumbing rides. Although Kitty has a few other tricks she’d like to teach him, Dove says no to hobo hanky-panky because his heart remains true to Hallie, whom he calls his religion. 
After a brief stopover at the rundown café of Mexican head-turner Teresina (Baxter) results in Kitty showing her claws (jealous of the attentions accorded Dove, she steals from the proprietress) the morally offended dirt farmer sends her on her way and stays on at Teresina’s place as a hired-hand.
The composition of this shot pretty much sums up Walk on the Wild Side's secondary conflict
Cut to New Orleans’ French Quarter and the popular bordello known as The Doll House run by no-nonsense lesbian Jo Courtney (Stanwyck), and her devoted but ineffectual husband, a former carny strongman by the name of Achilles Schmidt (Karl Swenson) who lost his legs in a train accident. The story's big shocker (to the screenwriters perhaps, but certainly to no one with even a passing familiarity with soap opera plotting) is that Dove’s virginal and virtuous Hallie is The Doll House’s most desirable and sought-after prostitute … Jo categorically taking top honors as Hallie’s most persistent and ardent pursuer.
As Hallie, statuesque ex-model Capucine embodies the kind of regal, exotic glamour suitable to a high-priced escort ("Upscale and sophisticated enough to take anywhere!") but  beauty aside, the woman comes off as the least fun hooker you're likely to rent.

Of course, when Dove finally reunites with his wild Texas love with whom he shared his first kiss and more: “Afterwards, in the moonlight...we danced like we was celebrating a miracle. A crazy kind of dance. And then we sang and shouted...like it wasn't real” a ridiculous reminiscence rendered laughably inconceivable once we set eyes on the high-cheekboned grandness of Capucinethe romantically idealistic hayseed is a tad slow in catching on as to how Hallie manages to afford all those expensive Pierre Cardin-designed frocks from 30 years in the future, But when he does, heartbroken disillusionment gives way to the usual macho proprietary protectiveness.
The intense dislike Capucine and Harvey had for one another is the stuff of legend

You see, since the film regards Hallie’s lost virtue as something that has been taken from Dove, and sees him as the principally wronged party, it’s then up to him to take the necessary steps to secure and safeguard Hallie's soul and body...'cause that's what patriarchy demands. (As any pro-lifer will tell you,  women just aren't capable of handling decisions about what they choose to do with their own bodies for themselves.)

Resorting to his father's bible-thumping ways, Dove proselytizes ... I mean, explains to an understandably exasperated Teresina (who's busy meanwhile dousing her torch):
 “In the Bible, Hosea fell in love with Gomer. She was a harlot. They got married but she couldn't stay away from men. Hosea got mad and threw her out. Sold her into slavery. But he couldn't get her out of his mind, so he went looking for her. When he found her, he brought her back home. But it was no good. Before long, she was up to her old tricks again. But he loved her anyway and he couldn't give her up. So he took her into the wilderness...away from temptation. Away from other men. And that's what I have to do with Hallie.”
I'm sorry, but we're supposed to buy that these two stunning, continental-looking creatures spent even one minute in dustbowl Texas?
The bulk of Walk on the Wild Side occupies itself with being a romantic triangle-cum-spiritual tug-of-war between Dove (representing honest values and true love) and Jo (representing well-dressed depravity and perversion) with the magnificent but I’m-not-all-that-convinced-she’s-worth-all-this-trouble Hallie at the center.
Happily, by way of distraction we have the welcome reappearance of Kitty, the former boxcar good-time-girl transformed into a garter-snapping sexpot as the newest employee of The Doll House. Also on hand is chipper Southern belle Miss Precious (the always terrific Joanna MooreTatum O’Neal’s mom), a Doll House resident who sleeps on a confederate flag pillow and punctuates even the shortest sentences with “The Colonel always said….” Lastly, there's sexy, short-tempered strong-arm-man Oliver (Richard Rust of Homicidal), who has an eye for the ladies and suede gloves to keep his hands nice and unbruised when he roughs them up. 
Inquiring Minds Want to Know
Menacing roughneck Oliver (Richard Rust) needs some answers from Kitty 

Posters for Walk on the Wild Side exclaimed, “A side of life you never expected to see on the screen!”, which is not altogether false given you've got a 4-time Oscar-nominee playing one of the screen’s first lesbians (who's alive at the end, yet!) and the daring-for-its-time setting of a New Orleans brothel. The rest, alas, is what Hollywood has always done: a) Offer up endless reworkings of the Madonna-whore dichotomy as soap opera and love story, b) Promise to shock and scandalize while only serving up the same staunch conservatism and prudery.
Joanna Moore as Miss Precious
A personal favorite and incapable of giving a bad performance, this incandescent actress with the very sad life story is one of the bright spots in Walk on the Wild Side

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I'm not sure if the genre has been afforded any name other than "southern gothic," but whatever it's called, I am a major fan of the overheated sex and psychosis dramas of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Carson McCullers. When these southern-fried potboilers are crossed with a touch of the soap-opera overstatement associated with Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, and Sidney Sheldon ...well, I'm in 7th Heaven. Walk on the Wild Side has all the luridness of Williams, the pretentiousness of Inge, plus all the unintentional humor of anything bearing the stamp of Susann.
There's dialogue that sounds as though it were written by a robot; overearnest performances that are nevertheless as limp as clothesline; the ever-present topic of sex which is hinted at and alluded to but never spoken of in even remotely direct terms; and clashing accents left and rightTexas drawl, Southern twang, Georgia singsong, French, British, and Mexican (sort of).
Riding the Rails
Jane Fonda looks a good deal like her father Henry in The Grapes of Wrath in this shot of Dove and Kitty catching a ride in a freight car
Fans of the by-now-anticipated unwillingness and inability of '60s films to remain faithful to the era they're depicting will have a field day with Walk on the Wild Side's interpretation of the Depression era South. Outside of a few automobiles and some distant dress extras, the look is 1961 through and through. A long time ago a friend of mine who once designed costumes for film told me that this is not an unintentional or careless phenomenon. It's an industry's appeal to the contemporary aesthetic tastes of their audience.
We're asked to believe that Hallie, a woman who quotes Eliot and asks johns for Brancusi sculptures as gifts, ever had anything to do with a man as "basic" (read: boring) as Dove 
When a studio is forking over big bucks for a glamour actress, they want the audience to see her as glamorous. The concern is that the baggy fashions and severe makeup styles of the '30s (thin eyebrows, bow lips, thick stockings, figure-concealing frocks, etc) will look odd or comical to '60s audiences.
A point well taken, I concede. but it doesn't address the jarring incongruity of seeing 1960s bouffants and bullet bras stepping out of 1930s DeSotos.
The late-great Juanita Moore as Mama

PERFORMANCES
Where to start? To say that I enjoy all the performances in Walk on the Wild Side is not at all saying that many of them are any good. If anyone emerges from the chaos with their dignity intact, it's Barbara Stanwyck. Not really called upon to deliver more than a professional, standard-issue Stanwyck tough-broad performance, she's nevertheless the most believably passionate person in the entire film for me. She wants Hallie and I don't doubt it for a minute. I'm actually rather crazy about Barbara Stanwyck as an actress, anyway. She's one of my favorite classic-era actresses.
The strikingly beautiful Capucine may not be much of an actress, but she's not helped much by a script that asks her to be a non-stop pill from the minute we see her. Male screenwriters are sometimes guilty of writing "beauty" as a character trait in women, and in the case of Hallie Gerard, so little of her passion, restlessness, or joy is captured that we're left to think that she's so desired simply because she's so outrageously pretty. If the Hallie we now see is supposed to represent a broken woman whose life-force has been drained out of her due to having "fallen down the well," the entirety of backstory we're left to imagine requires an actress substantially more skilled than what we're given. You get about as much emotionally out of Capucine here as you would from one of her model photo shoots from the '50s.
Jane Fonda wins points for giving the film's liveliest performance. Liberated from the lacquered, overly-mature look studios foisted on her for The Chapman Report and Period of Adjustment (both 1962), Fonda is sexier and looser here. Perhaps even a little too loose in her early scenes, as there is something about "earthy" characters that brings forth the inner ham in actors. In her early scenes, Fonda can't seem to keep her finishing school refinement from creeping into her overly-mannered interpretation of Kitty Twist, railway ragamuffin. Parts of her performance have the feel of an over-coached acting school scene. But she's never a dull presence (unlike some of her co-stars) and really comes into her own in the sequences in The Doll house. She looks amazing as well. The cameraman obviously thought so too, for Fonda's shapely backside has arguably as many closeups as her face.
Anne Baxter's terrible Mexican accent ("Wha hoppen?") never fails to incite giggles
Laurence Harvey has always been a favorite of mine (owing at least in part to my tendency to develop matinee crushes on birdlike, Tony Perkins types), but he really seems out of his element here. The thoroughly engaging (and sexy) energy he brought to 1959s Expresso Bongo is nowhere to be seen in the tediously virtuous Dove Linkhorn.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Is there some axiom that says the cooler the opening credits sequence, the more likely one is apt to be let down with the film? Outside of the brilliant and stylish art-deco title sequence for the 1974 screen adaptation of Mame which got me all hyped-up only to then lead me down a path of soft-focus croaking, Saul Bass' snazzy, jazz-tinged title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (assisted immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated Elmer Bernstein, Mack David theme music) sets one up for a film that never materializes.
Edward Dmytryk would go on to direct Richard Burton and Joey Heatherton in Bluebeard.

The beginning and end title sequences are the very best things about Walk on the Wild Side. 
If you've seen the movie, the question that immediately comes to mind is, who took that photo on the left? 
You can take a look at the Saul Bass title sequence on YouTube

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Walk on the Wild Side is, like the 1976 US/USSR collaboration that resulted in the dreadful musical mistake that was The Bluebird, a film whose backstory is infinitely more interesting than the motion picture released. Conflict-of-interest deals were behind much of Walk on the Wild Side's grab-bag casting (Laurence Harvey was being promoted by the wife of the head of Columbia Studios, while Capucine was being promoted by producer Charles K. Feldman). The film was plagued by constant rewrites, deleted scenes (the internet is full of rumors regarding a curiously missing-in-action hairbrush spanking scene between Stanwyck and Capucine...be still my heart), costly delays, and a cast that was often openly antagonistic to one another as well as to the director.
Nine years later, Jane Fonda would win a Best Actress Oscar for playing a prostitute in Klute (1971)
The end result is a film that is a disappointment as both drama and love story, but a bonanza of unintentional humor and delicious badness. And you'd be hard pressed to find a more enjoyably watchable film. Easy on the eyes and no strain on the brain, your biggest concern will be stomach cramps from laughing aloud at the dialogue.Woefully tame and coy by today's standards, Walk on the Wild Side maintains its historical notoriety as one of the earliest major motion pictures to feature a lesbian character. As the years have passed, the film has revealed itself as a movie with a pretty high behind-the-scenes LGBT pedigree as well. The names of Laurence Harvey, Capucine, and Barbara Stanwyck have all been mentioned in various celebrity memoirs as being gay or bisexual, while Jane Fonda has written in her own autobiography about participating in bisexual three-ways with her husband Roger Vadim.

You'd think a little bit of all that sexual democracy might have wound up on the screen, but no. At best, Walk on the Wild Side remains an entertaining but tame timepiece and cultural curio for those interested in seeing what kind of film Hollywood thought it was ready to tackle during the early days of the abandonment of the Motion Picture Production Code.
Walk on the Mild Side
Copyright © Ken Anderson