LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR 1977

In hindsight, it seems coincidental and full of foreboding that both Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever were released within months of each other at the tail end of 1977 (October and December, respectively). These films brought a somber, reflective conclusion to a year that began with the release of George Lucas' escapist blockbuster Star Wars.

Diane Keaton as Theresa Dunn

No one could have known it at the time, but Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever sounded the dissonant, disco-beat death-knell tolling the end of the '70s and the demise of the sexual revolution. The looming specter of AIDS only serving to make Looking for Mr. Goodbar's dispiriting linking of sex and death feel positively prescient.
Both of these films embodied attitudes that stood as barbed provocation to the 1970s in general, and the Utopian promise of sexual liberation in particular. The hopeful assurance that drugs, free love, sexual exploration, feminism, group therapy, hedonism, the new morality, and porno-chic were the self-fulfillment remedy for the oppressive restrictiveness of the past. Meanwhile, on a somewhat minor, but no less catastrophic cultural scale, cinematically speaking, the blockbuster success of Star Wars signaled the waning days of major movie studios showing any interest in making mature, challenging films like Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

When, in 1976, I saw Martin Scorsese’s trenchant urban nightmare Taxi Driver, I thought then that I had seen the most depressing film the '70s had to offer. Clearly, I hadn’t reasoned on what 65-year-old writer/director Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, In Cold Blood) had up his sleeve in bringing Judith Rossner’s controversial 1975 bestseller Looking for Mr. Goodbar to the screen. It was, without a doubt, the feel-bad movie of 1977.

Inspired by the gruesome 1973 real-life murder of New York schoolteacher/singles bar habitué Roseann Quinn, Brooks’ Looking for Mr. Goodbar is part opaque character study, part sociosexual thriller. It chronicles (with provocative moral ambiguity), the confused emancipation/dissociation of Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton): gifted teacher of deaf children by day, by night, pill-popping, singles bar-hopper salving her scars—literal and psychological—through submersion in the twilight world of detached, casual-sex encounters with anonymous, increasingly unsavory partners.

Theresa’s through-the-looking-glass (darkly) journey is largely a reactive one. Her romantic skepticism, a result of an over-idealized fling with an emotionally abusive college professor (Alan Feinstein); her lack of desire for children, a dual response to her sister’s multiple abortions, and her own fear of passing on congenital scoliosis. Her determined need for independence is most assuredly a backlash against the stifling life options proffered by her bellicose father (Richard Kiley) who would have Theresa settle down with a nice Catholic boy, cranking out one baby after another like her kid sister Brigid (Laurie Prange).

That Theresa’s emancipation ultimately takes the form of a paradoxical dual existence—"Saint Theresa by day and swinging Terry by night”—signals not only her unresolved inner conflicts, but underscore a point I think is germane to the appreciation of  Looking for Mr. Goodbar as something more complex and infinitely smarter than a simplistic moral cautionary tale about the dangers awaiting single women in the big, bad city.

It sheds light on the fact that the “New Morality” of the '70s did absolutely nothing to minimize or reconfigure the sexual double-standard. In spite of the newfound freedoms of the era, women were still viewed in terms of Madonna/whore. Their bodies and reproductive rights, open-forum landscapes for religious, politico-social debate; their very independence rendering them more vulnerable than ever as targets of male sexual aggression.
By way of example: most movie critics at the time blamed Theresa's violent fate on her reckless behavior. As though death was a foregone conclusion or some kind of patriarchal retribution for the sexually promiscuous female. Many weighed in on how self-destructive the character was, or how she harbored a death wish, but I don't recall a single critic placing the blame where it belonged: on her violent, mentally unstable rapist/murderer.  That and a homophobic culture that encourages men to loathe anything feminine within themselves, and to gauge their masculinity on a scale of sexual performance and aggressive behavior. 

Teaser ad from The Hollywood Reporter - 1977

When I saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar at the Regency Theater in San Francisco the first weekend of its opening, I was at the time just a sidelines observer to the sexual revolution. A 20-year-old virgin attending college in one of the most progressive cities in the world; I neither drank nor smoked, didn’t partake of drugs, and had yet to set foot in a disco. But the era was so alive and abuzz with change, excitement, and energy, even a Catholic-reared, late-bloomer like me walked around in a near-constant haze of sensual distraction. Honestly, San Francisco in the '70s was so stimulating an environment, you would have sworn the city's fog was at least 50% amyl nitrate.

Richard Gere as Tony Lo Porto

That being said, I think it was precisely my sidelines status that contributed to my taking note of signs of battle fatigue within the sexual revolution. What had started out as a cultural movement of joy and self-discovery had, by 1977, transmogrified into something quite different. The sexual revolution had become a commoditized, cynically co-opted wave of sex merchandising and lifestyle branding that exposed the unspoken lie behind the rhetoric of sexual freedom and liberation. The lie (or perhaps, the naïve hope) being that sex was not intimacy, human physical contact bore no psychological or spiritual consequence, and that we as humans were not profoundly affected by its lack. What led me to this conclusion was the odd phenomenon of getting a good look at the faces of all the high-profile hedonists of my generation. John Holmes, Marilyn Chambers, Hugh Hefner, Linda Lovelace...they all looked like hell. The average 1970s swinger, toward the end of the decade, tended to look like a hollowed-out pod person.

Surely, something beyond alcohol and drug use accounted for the glazed, dead eyes staring out from all those glossy sex magazines like Playboy, Viva, and Hustler. Was there a reason suburban swingers always looked so vacant and debauched? Why was it, whenever I passed by the doors of singles bars, none of the clientele ever looked particularly happy? If the new morality was as joyous and life-affirming as the pop culture media hype kept assuring me, why did its practitioners look so cheerless?
Something told me that the enraptured lyrics (and moans) of all those disco songs weren't telling the whole story.

The '70s: The era of sexual revolution or dehumanization?
Sex was more visible, but attitudes were still mired in sin, shame, and debasement

Although I hadn’t yet read the book, I knew enough about Looking for Mr. Goodbar and the incident that inspired it to be excited by the prospect of a contemporary film attempting to capture a cultural climate teeming with contrasts and contradictions. 

Tuesday Weld snagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Katherine Dunn, a walking microcosm of '70s self-absorption and the unfocused quest for the ideal existence

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of my favorite things about the '70s is that it was such a self-reflective era in motion pictures. In fact, a frequent criticism leveled at American films at the time was that they, representative of the “Me Decade” in general, were in a rut of compulsive navel-gazing. Nearly always of the bleak, post-Watergate disillusionment sort. Looking for Mr. Goodbar was NOT the exception.

When the relatively hang-loose permissiveness of the late '60s evolved into the self-conscious hedonism of the mid-'70s, it wasn’t difficult to detect a hint of desperation behind disco music’s over-emphatic exuberance. The search for fulfillment through sensual expression ofttimes gave off the sense of a prowl or hunt...but for what? With all the rampant drug and alcohol use, had sexual liberation, once thought to be the gateway to honest and open human interaction, become just another means of escaping reality? To numb the pain of existence? To shelter our darker demons? To create a greater distance between people? 

Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been subtitled: The Pleasure Paradox
The Pleasure Paradox is the belief that happiness, when pursued 
(that elusive Mr. Goodbar), remains ever beyond one's grasp 

Behind Looking for Mr. Goodbar's topicality and incendiary commingling of sex, guilt, and religion which so distracted critics at the time, the film is both artful and honest in its attempt to address many of the above-stated issues. More so than any film I've yet to see. Looking for Mr. Goodbar explores the fissures that began to show in the “If it feels good, do it” façade of the new morality. Tackling simultaneously: feminism, religious hypocrisy, the sexual double-standard, and America’s intractable linking of sex and violence.

When I first saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I knew right away it was something special. From the first saxophone strains initiating that gloriously unsettling title sequence, I was hooked. (The title sequence is like a short film in and of itself. It's a flowing montage of gritty black and white still shots capturing the vaguely dangerous allure of singles bars.)
The entire cast, Diane Keaton especially, makes something poignant and frighteningly real out of a story begging for sensationalism. Director Richard Brooks keeps to a palette motif of lights and darks; contrasting and paralleling the lighter scenes at the Dunn household (pitched to operatic levels) with the darkness of the emotional violence lurking on the sidelines of Theresa's solitary, but not lonely, independent life.

Richard Kiley as Theresa's no-patience-for-imperfections father

The jarring use of sound and William Fraker's dark, dark, dark cinematography (I initially thought it was shot by Gordon Willis) contribute to making Looking for Mr. Goodbar one of the most powerful movies of the '70s. And make no mistake about it, this movie scared the bejesus out of me. The book was so popular, even if you hadn't read it you knew how it was going to end; but knowing is not the same as being prepared. The harrowing, near-unwatchable concluding moments of Looking for Mr. Goodbar left me feeling shell-shocked. That opening weekend, I still believe the reason I  remained in the theater to watch it a second time was simply because I was just too stunned to move out of my seat.

Not everyone’s cup of tea for any number of reasons, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (dubbed Mr. Goodbarf by many left queasy by the film's violence) is for me an example of American self-reflective cinema at its best. Not the least because it’s an adult film that takes the risk of allowing itself to be misunderstood. I like that it doesn’t spell everything out and tell you how you should feel or react. It has a point of view and even an agenda, but it doesn't invite you to agree with it so much as it encourages you to just think about it. Some people dismiss the film as simplistic, others find it to be moralizing and misogynistic, and some just don't care for it because the topic is too depressing and sordid. No matter what people ultimately think, few find it to be forgettable. 

William Atherton as James (here washing the very knife that will play a role in the film's hellish denouement), the slightly creepy "nice guy" whose resentful response to being moved into the friend zone is to behave in an aggressive,  possessively entitled manner every bit as unstable as the woman-hating "bad boys" he thinks he's superior to.
 Sound familiar?

PERFORMANCES

Because there were so many interesting actresses around in the '70s, it’s easy for me to forget that the decade was largely a boys’ club devoted to buddy movies and misunderstood anti-heroes. By way of illustration, when the time came to adapt Rossner’s woman-centric bestseller to the screen, only male directors were considered: Bernardo Bertolucci, Bob Fosse (I shudder at the thought), Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, and Roman Polanski.

LeVar Burton as Cap Jackson
Looking for Mr. Goodbar marked the feature film debut of Burton, who became an overnight household name when the landmark miniseries, Roots aired earlier in the year

Closer to the reality of the '70s is that on those rare occasions when an actress was called upon to play something other than the girlfriend or male support system (to get Goodbar, Keaton turned down the largely thankless Julie Christie role in Heaven Can Wait), the characters were so well-written (Katharine Ross–The Stepford Wives) and performances so superb (Jane Fonda–Klute), their prominence in my memory contradicts their actual scarcity. 

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is unequivocally my all-time favorite Diane Keaton movie. I actually think it’s the best work of her career. But, apropos of the dark/light contrasts of the Theresa Dunn character herself, I don’t think I would have fully appreciated her work here were it not for my having previously seen her in Annie Hall (released the same year). Onscreen almost constantly, Keaton's performance here is astonishingly raw.
The range and depth of her characterization appear simultaneously natural and going-for-broke risk-taking. As screen heroines go (anti-heroine?) Keaton's Theresa Dunn is a true original; I've never seen a character like her in a film before or since. She's dimensional, complex, contradictory, funny, and operates under her own agency. For my money, Diane Keaton is simply staggering and was a very inspired choice for the part. It really makes you wish the actress had pursued more dramatic roles.

Alan Feinstein as Professor Martin Engle

As for the character itself, I've always considered Theresa Dunn to be '70s cinema’s first anti-heroine: a female sexual outlaw and cultural nonconformist. And, like all rebels, she’s not always likable, smart, or rational–just a paradoxical, vulnerable human being struggling to make sense of the contradictions of her nature, deciding for herself what she wants to be, and accepting the risks (which, as it turns out, are considerable in our culture of normalized female-directed aggression) of choosing to live life on her own terms.
Like a great many of her male counterparts in '70s cinema (portrayed by the likes of Richard Benjamin, Jack Nicholson, and Dustin Hoffman), Keaton's character delves into sex and drugs in a quest for self-discovery. And for once a woman’s exploration of her sexuality is presented in a manner both perceptive and honest enough to allow for the enjoyment of no-strings sex for its purely sensual appeal and the addictive nature of its ability to dull existential pain. 

"Get this into one of your two heads, the one that can think...I am my own girl! I belong to me!"

Controversial and prone to dividing critics and fans alike into "love it/loathe it" camps exclusively, I think the fact that Looking for Mr. Goodbar is such a downer of a film is the reason it never received the credit it deserved for the rather groundbreaking sincerity and seriousness with which it approached female sexuality. Anyone coming to Goodbar hoping for gauzy, soft-core porn cloaked in faux-feminist empowerment rhetoric (a la the popular Emmanuelle franchise) was in for a shock. Similarly, those who sought to see an allegory of a bad girl punished for her sins were left wanting, as well.

If screenwriter Brooks is guilty of anything, it's in being too honest. Taking a tack different from the book, the Theresa of the film is not the self-loathing masochist with a death-wish Judith Rossner wrote about (and so many critics longed for in order to help explain away their discomfort with the story's theme). She is simply a flawed, perhaps emotionally damaged woman who pays dearly for making one too many bad choices. Incidentally, Rossner was said to have been displeased with the film, finding Keaton's character too "happy."

Because things end badly for the character of Theresa, Looking for Mr. Goodbar was seen by many as an anti-feminist cautionary tale for single women. But I challenge that point of view as one laid at the feet of the viewer, not the film itself. I mean, things ended very badly for Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but I don’t recall anyone calling that film a cautionary tale for hippie drug dealers.

Robert Fields as Rafe and Carole Mallory as Marvella
Fans of The Stepford Wives will recognize these two swingers. She played a robotized housewife, he played the chemist Raymond Chandler, Katharine Ross' first love.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I only got around to reading Looking for Mr. Goodbar two years ago, an experience which left me appreciating even more what Richard Brooks' skill as a screenwriter (his first career) brought to the film version. To me, his work is a vast improvement over the source material, which I found too quick to place a big, glaring bullseye on Theresa's back. Richard Brooks, when faced with the challenge of making the character more sympathetic (aka, real) and extracting suspense from a story whose ending most everyone already knows, builds tension through the stylized application of a motif that's almost Biblical in its emphasis on the argument of free will vs the predeterminism of fate.

Brooks cannily uses innocuous events in the "light" parts of Theresa's life (as a teacher) to foreshadow the progressively violent trend of her "dark" nocturnal pursuits.

In assisting a deaf child to feel the forming of a word, Theresa has the girl hold her throat. A choking image that will be reenacted (horrifically) later. 

Asked to come up with words that will produce enough air to move a feather, a child repeats the word "punch." When asked to come up with a less violent word, he responds with repeated shouts of "help!"

Having overslept due to a night of partying, Theresa is greeted by an angry classroom. On the board is written, "You don't care!" The phrase: an inadvertent commentary on her desire for emotional disengagement in her private life. The death-mask skull: an ominous foreshadowing of the film's final image.

At the time, so much was made of Theresa's "double life" (warmhearted teacher of deaf children by day / emotionally detached bar-hopper by night) as being a sure sign of her schizophrenic, self-destructive nature. A hetero-normative, gender-based double standard rearing its head once again. Looked at from a feminist or LGBTQ perspective, many individuals in the '70s, particularly gay people, lived lives of duality. Forced to behave one way during the day to keep their jobs, only free to be themselves on weekends or in the evenings at bars and clubs. From this point of view, Theresa's duality is less an indicator of a conflicted sexuality than it is representative of our culture's prudish double standards. Society consistently reveals its inability to recognize self-identified female sexuality beyond the confines of partnered/male validation (boyfriend, husband).

A scene reflective of our culture's inability to visualize women's agency outside the scope of their relationship to men: Theresa has difficulty convincing a one-night stand that her desire for him to leave is born of a personal choice. Instead, he's convinced she's awaiting the arrival of a boyfriend or husband. This is similar to when a man comes on to a woman, ignoring her personal claim of not being interested. She has to say "I have a boyfriend" for it to be valid. Men are traditionally raised to respect other men's "property"--they're not often raised to respect a woman's personal choices.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

"How do women still go out with guys when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.”   

“Every guy has a ‘crazy girlfriend’ story. Why don’t women have ‘crazy men’ stories? I never hear that. Why? Because if you have a crazy boyfriend, you’re gonna die.”   

Theresa's flights of fantasy reflect her conflicted self-identity

Looking for Mr. Goodbar was released decades before Sex and the City, so there were few cultural paradigms in place through which audiences could process the notion of a sexually active single woman living alone in a metropolitan city without resorting to blame-the-victim thinking and terminology. In discussing the film and Keaton's character, it was the rare reviewer who didn't resort to words like self-loathing, nymphomaniacal, self-destructive, desperate, mentally ill, masochistic, unstable, depressive. 
The whole thing was quite ironic: while calling out Richard Brooks for making a morally reactionary sexual thriller, movie critics couldn't stop themselves from reaching the conclusion that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were a certain fast-track to death for a single woman. A point which failed to acknowledge that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were cornerstones for a great many male coming-of-age films of the era, but nobody saw anything fatalistic in men engaging in such "boys will be boys" behavior.

Tom Berenger as Gary

On a similar note, Goodbar came out long before the concept of rape culture, so at no time could one find a journalist willing to devote even a paragraph to the castigation of the brutish, violent behavior of the men in the film. Nor could you find articles addressing our normalized attitudes on the matter of rape and other forms of female-directed aggression in the age of sexual permissiveness. All I recall reading were a lot of human-interest articles about parents taking their daughters to see the film as a means (I can only suppose) of terrorizing them into celibacy. Of course, there were no stories about sons being taken to the film by their parents to teach them not to rape and abuse women.

A lot has changed over the years, but not so much that a daringly mature film like Looking for Mr. Goodbar doesn't have something relevant to say to contemporary audiences. As stated earlier, it's a film that begs to be rediscovered and reevaluated in terms broader than the lazy label of  "cautionary tale" has afforded it. It's an unpleasant film, to be sure, but an honest one. Perhaps even a bit too honest. But it's an inarguably important entry from a decade when the objective of major motion pictures wasn't always to placate and pacify, but to get us to think. Unfortunately, I'm still looking for Looking for Mr. Goodbar...at least until the day Paramount decides to finally release it on DVD.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2014

I AM A CAMERA 1955

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

Christopher Isherwood  - The Berlin Stories 1945

I've wanted to see I Am a Camera for 42 years. That's the length of time I've been aware of—yet unable to lay eyes upon—this little-known, rarely-televised, not-available-on DVD, all-but-forgotten adaptation of the successful Broadway play that inspired the Broadway & film musical Cabaret and gave the screen its very first Sally Bowles.

Julie Harris as Sally Bowles

Laurence Harvey as Christopher Isherwood

Shelley Winters as Natalia Landauer

Anton Diffring as Fritz Wendel

Forty-two years ago: It was 1972, I was a freshman in high school, and Cabaret had just opened nationally. I was eager to see the film on the strength of my fascination with Bob Fosse's choreography in Sweet Charity (1969) and my infatuation with Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), but in order to persuade my family to select it for a night out at the movies, I had to rely on the scores of critical raves quoted in the newspaper ads. Which was all for the good because I knew next to nothing about just what Cabaret was.

I had absolutely no foreknowledge of Christopher Isherwood's 1945 novelized twin-memoir: The Berlin Stories; I was in the dark about playwright John Van Druten (I Remember Mama) adapting one of those short novels—Goodbye to Berlin—into the 1951 play I Am a Camera (prompting theater critic Walter Kerr's terse, too-oft-quoted review, "Me no Leica"); and I was thoroughly unaware that said seriocomic play had served as the structural source for the 1966 musical Cabaret…the original Broadway production serving as merely the launchpad for Fosse's significantly reworked movie adaptation.

Well, as if to prove the adage "ignorance is bliss," a byproduct of my state of unenlightenment was that it afforded me the rare opportunity of enjoying Cabaret free of the usual burdens that come with seeing a beloved stage and/or literary work adapted into another medium. That feeling of never fully being "in the moment" born of anticipating the omission or mishandling of some favored line or bit of business. Sometimes it's a ceaseless, almost involuntary process of comparison and sizing up which goes on in your head as you watch, hoping expectation doesn't outpace execution.

Lea Seidl as Fraulein Schneider, the landlady

Ron Randell as Clive Mortimer, the rich American playboy

Like most everyone who saw it at the time, I was utterly blown away by Cabaret. Especially its stylish, darkly atmospheric depiction of the social and moral decay of pre-Nazi Germany in the '30s…so ideally suited to Bob Fosse's particular brand of razzle-dazzle cynicism. In an attempt to rectify my prior obliviousness, I subsequently took to reading everything I could about the film.

My first discovery was that it was the rare Cabaret review or feature article which didn't reference the film version of I am A Camera. Always unfavorably. Some remarked on the film's failure to do justice to Van Druten's play, others complained that it didn't successfully bring to life Isherwood's colorful characters, all cited it as the first on-screen incarnation of Sally Bowles. While it definitely came as a surprise to me to learn that Fräulein Bowles (who to this day is difficult to envision as anyone other than Liza Minnelli) appeared on film a whopping 17 years before Cabaret even existed, what really knocked me for a loop was that it was in the startlingly against-type personage of Julie Harris.

I couldn't imagine two actresses with less in common than Liza Minnelli and Julie Harris. Even in the most democratic of fantasies, I'm hard-pressed to envision any point at which the talents of these two very gifted ladies might intersect to make feasible the notion of their being cast in the same role. One's a jackhammer, the other a tap on the shoulder. It piqued my interest no end to discover that it was Harris (an actress I adored, but always associated with reserved, Plain Jane roles like in The Haunting, East of Eden, and You're a Big Boy Now) who originated the role of one of literature's most flamboyant extroverts...and won a Tony Award for it in the bargain!

Divine Decadence
Sally bares her emerald-green nails (and tigress snarl)

Suddenly, I am A Camera became a movie I absolutely had to see. In 1972, I hoped the popularity of Cabaret would occasion a resurfacing of it on late-night TV or at a local revival theater…but no such luck. My frustration knew no bounds. In those pre-cable/pre-DVD days, it certainly wasn't out of the ordinary to have to wait a long time for a favored old movie to make the rounds, but I am A Camera was a unique case in that absolutely no one I knew (not my parents nor my older sister, who was a Late Show maven if ever there was one) had ever heard of it, much less seen it.

Years passed (decades, actually), and I am A Camera eventually became one of those films (like Andy Warhol's L'Amour) I resigned myself to never seeing. Then, two weeks ago, just as I'd all but forgotten all about it, what do you know?... there it was, big as life on YouTube!!!!

So it's true, good things come to those who wait...for a VERY long time!

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Having read so little that was encouraging about I Am a Camera, I'm afraid that when the time came for me to finally see it, I did so more out of curiosity than conviction. After it was over, I wanted to give each of those early critics a solid trouncing over the head (myself included, for believing them), for to my great surprise, I found I Am a Camera to be a thorough and utter delight. Maybe I wouldn't have thought so back in 1972 when the air of solemnity Fosse brought to Cabaret rode the then-popular wave of pessimism of so many Nixon-era films (which flattered my adolescent self-seriousness); but today, I Am a Camera's unremittingly old-fashioned, studio-bound, almost farcical, light-comic approach distinguishes it so significantly from every other adaptation of Isherwood's memoirs I've seen, that it stands far and apart from comparison and represents to me, a work unique unto itself.

Presented in the form of an extended flashback told to fellow writing associates by "confirmed bachelor," now successful author Christopher Isherwood (Harvey), I Am a Camera recalls the years Isherwood spent as a struggling writer in Berlin in the 1930s. In vignette style, the film recounts his platonic, life-changing friendship with free-spirit Sally Bowles (Harris), a modestly talented cabaret singer and self-styled bohemian whose flighty manner and impulsive behavior propel him into adventures that ultimately serve as the basis and inspiration for his early writing successes. A subplot involving his only-slightly-worldlier friend, Fritz (Diffring), a would-be gigolo and closet Jew, wooing a department-store heiress (Winters), introduces a bit of drama and brings Germany's mounting Nazi threat to the forefront.

The Nazi Intrusion
Sally, Clive, and Christopher momentarily have their spirits dampened by a Jewish funeral procession  

I Am a Camera doesn't deviate significantly from the basic plot of Cabaret, its chief point of departure being merely one of approach. While Minnelli's Sally Bowles symbolized the kind of I'm-dancing-as-fast-as-I can, willful self-deception that allowed the Nazis to take over a Depression-era Germany by salving its sorrows with decadence. I Am a Camera presents Isherwood's adventures as a lighthearted coming-of-age story and depicts Bowles as something of an early incarnation of that genre staple: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (thank you, Nathan Rabin) – the quirky, childlike female character who brings chaos into the orderly life of a sensitive, button-down type, only to leave him a better, more-matured artist for it.

Katherine Hepburn played one in Bringing Up Baby (1938), and so did Sandy Dennis in Sweet November (1968). Certainly, Minnelli's Pookie Adams from The Sterile Cuckoo qualifies (although the word "nightmare" might be more appropriate than dream), and the characters of Dolly Levi and Mame Dennis from Hello, Dolly! and Auntie Mame, respectively, are nothing if not the Manic Pixie Dream Matron. Of course, the great Grande Diva of Manic Pixie Dream Girls is Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and ultimately it is this film, not Cabaret, which I Am a Camera most recalls.

One of the setpieces of I Am a Camera is a raucous, remarkably staged party scene that predates Blake Edwards' iconic cocktail party sequence in Breakfast at Tiffany's 

Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (published in 1958) and Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (published in 1939) are novelized memoirs by gay men recalling their transformative friendships with quirky, unconventional women of liberated sexuality. Whereas Tiffany's was converted into a romantic comedy (even Cabaret imposed a false romance), Camera leaves Isherwood's homosexuality as coded as the '50s would allow (his declaration, "I suppose I'm not the marrying kind," is tantamount to coming out). 

PERFORMANCES

Whether or not one cares for I Am a Camera's lighthearted touch and bittersweet Hollywood happy ending (which still feels more honest than making the Isherwood character bisexual [the movie musical] or straight [the stage musical]), I can't imagine any fan of classic cinema not being enchanted by the sight of so many brilliant dramatic actors displaying such a talent for comedy.

British actor Laurence Harvey, long a favorite of mine yet so unaccountably stiff and affectless in so many of his American roles, is appealingly naïf and boyish as Isherwood. I've always harbored a big crush on him, so perhaps I'm not exactly what you'd call an objective judge, but I'd easily rank his work in I Am a Camera alongside Room at the Top and Expresso Bongo as among Harvey's best film performances.

In a reversal of her role in 1951's A Place in the Sun, Shelley Winters
 plays an heiress wooed by a fortune-hunter 

As for the strikingly handsome Anton Diffring, so chilling as the villain in Fahrenheit 451 and an actor who literally made a career out of playing cold-hearted Nazis, I never would have guessed he'd be so charming a light comedy player. Honestly, I think this is the first film I've ever seen him smile! Several years away from the grating, undisciplined performances that would later brand her a camp film favorite, Shelley Winters has a surprisingly small role and displays a worrisome German accent, but she is endearing beyond belief. It's easy to forget what an accomplished comedienne she could be.

But hands-down, Julie Harris walks off with my highest praise. She's nothing short of sensational. I've seen Harris in many things over the years (even on Hollywood Squares, of all places), but I've never EVER seen her this perky and playful. I had no idea she could be such a flirtatious, funny, physical, and a vivacious personality. Her versatility is on full display here, capturing the many shades of Sally's mercurial personality, from her childlike vulnerability to her flashes of self-interested callousness. Speaking in that rapid-fire manner I associate with George Cukor movies, her Sally Bowles is less a bohemian iconoclast and reminds me more of Kathryn Hepburn's Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory (1933): all self-centered chatter and ostentatious show, but ultimately touching.

I found not a single moment of Harris' performance wanting, save for the poorly-matched dubbed singing voice she's given during her big cabaret number--the languid vocalist fails to capture the sprightliness of Harris' physical interpretation (I'm reminded of the too-calm dubbed voice attributed to Rita Moreno in West Side Story). Harris doesn't appear to be lip-syncing, leaving me to suspect the other voice was added post-production. i remember hearing Harris sing on the cast album of the 1965 Broadway musical Skyscraper ... she mostly went the Rex Harrison talk-sing route.

In the end, what pleased and surprised me most about Harris as Sally Bowles is the manner in which she tackles the role with such ease and command, inhabiting her character so winningly and completely that she resists comparisons to Liza Minnelli, making the part her own. No easy task, that.

"I remembered your eyes. It was as if they were asking me to look at you and yet not see you!"

It's believed that Julie Harris' outstanding performance was overlooked for an Oscar nomination because I Am a Camera--a British production that failed to punish its sexually promiscuous heroine or delete mention of abortion--was denied a Production Code Seal, resulting in many theaters refusing to screen it, and some newspapers refusing to carry ads. In the UK, it was given the "Certificate X" rating.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

While devoid of anything like Cabaret's "bumsen" scene, I Am a Camera is remarkably frank on the topics of sex, abortion, prostitution, and, depending on one's susceptibility to gay coding in old films, homosexuality. Considered risqué for its time, I was amused by just how much they were able to allude to in this 1955 film (a gay couple is briefly glimpsed in the nightclub scene) and enjoyed noting how many little details of style and content would later show up in Fosse's Cabaret.

This Sally sings at The Lady Windermere, but its clientele is pure Kit Kat Klub, 
as are its wall caricatures

Partaking of Sally's favorite pick-me-up: Prairie Oysters 

The Threesome...

...The Twosome

Laurence Harvey + rectal thermometer = sexiest scene in the film 

"I mean, I may not be absolutely exactly what some people call a virgin... ."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

For all the charismatic dominance of Sally Bowles and Julie Harris' standout performance, I Am a Camera ultimately manages to make good on its first-person title by being a story of one man's coming of age. The increased presence of the Nazis in Berlin challenges Isherwood's determination to just be a spectator in life, his ultimate inability to ignore its evil facilitates his growth as both a man and an artist.

For me, the poignancy of I Am a Camera is found in its final moments when it becomes clear (to us, if not the characters involved) that, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Christopher has possessed all along what he'd sought to find. As the only person to take pity on the abandoned Sally that first night in the club; to be the one individual who offered her shelter without the want of anything in return; to have remained by her side during a crisis, even going so far as to propose marriage and lose a promising job opportunity--Christopher was an "involved" participant in life from the very start. He was never for a moment the apathetic, unthinking "camera" he imagined himself to be.

Christopher ceases being the passive observer

Author Armistead Maupin in his 2008 introduction to Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories (and if you haven't read The Berlin Stories, I highly recommend it), makes the observation that Isherwood's narrative device of assuming the role of the "camera" in his memoirs--the impartial, uninvolved recorder of events--was the author's way of protecting himself. A method of intentionally keeping his homosexuality out of his autobiographical stories for fear that its mere inclusion would distract from everything else in the text. 

A necessity at the time, but one rectified by Isherwood himself in his 1976 memoir Christopher and His Kind, in which the very same pre-war Berlin years documented in this film are recounted with a proud acceptance of his sexuality and an acknowledgment of its profound influence on his life and his art. 

I Am a Camera; a film shrouded in period-mandated gay coding (the aforementioned "confirmed bachelor" line) and starring a closeted gay actor portraying an asexual/sexually ambiguous character; is a product of its time, yet nevertheless contains a timeless message. Especially for the LGBTQ community, which has been so much a part of Christopher Isherwood's enduring legacy. Society, when not actively seeking to eradicate, has always encouraged gay people to "hide in plain sight." To, in effect, protect ourselves through anonymity and the acceptance of a non-participatory role as a "camera" on the periphery of life.

I Am a Camera - (inadvertently perhaps, but I'd like to think by way of the innate humanity of Isherwood and his characters)--exposes inauthenticity as an obstruction to growth (Sally, a woman defined by artifice, never changes). It promotes the necessity of being true to oneself (Fritz finds love and is compelled to reveal his true self to Natalia), and it affirms the absolute necessity that we must all be active participants in life...no matter how complicated things become.

Since I consider Bob Fosse's Cabaret to be such a perfect film and wasn't really hoping to find a movie to compare it to or replace it with, I rejoiced in I Am a Camera turning out to be so comprehensively and refreshingly different. Making up for those 42 years of longing, I've already seen it three times and marvel at what a splendid lost gem it is. To quote Sally Bowles, I think I Am a Camera is "Most strange and extraordinary!"


BONUS MATERIAL
The tune Sally Bowles sings in her cabaret act is the 1951 German song, "Ich Hab Noch Einen Koffer in Berlin" (I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin), written by Ralph Maria Siegel. In this film, the song is given new English lyrics by Paul Dehn, the title changing to: "I Saw Him in a Café in Berlin."
You can Hear Marlene Dietrich sing the original song HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014