LONG WEEKEND 1978

"Hey, farmer, farmer put away the DDT, now. Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees. Please."    Big Yellow Taxi - Joni Mitchell - 1970 

The toxic pesticide DDT wasn’t banned until 1972, but the Environmentalist social movement responsible for bringing about that particular ecological ruling is also credited with inspiring the “Nature Strikes Back!” genre of horror films so popular in the '70s. Environmental horror films, also known as eco-horror movies, were a genre of exploitation film that saw wildlife and nature rebelling against mankind’s abuses. They were an amalgam of the mutant monster movies of the Atomic Age ‘50s; the man-against-man paranoia films of the Cold-War ‘60s; and the onset '70s realization that the prosperity-based corporate/industrialist “plastics” future satirically endorsed in The Graduate (1967) was taking a dire toll on the planet. Capturing the post-Vietnam/Watergate zeitgeist, these "Green Panic" films--well-intentioned exercises in societal self-flagellation---were the anxiety-induced by-product of America’s disillusionment and guilt.

When I was a kid, the air was literally brown with smog, motorists habitually dumped ashtrays and garbage out of their windows onto the freeway, and city sidewalks were freckled with the dots of chewing gum, cigarette butts, and the flip top tabs of soft drink cans. Pets were property, dog owners were not required to curb their dogs or pick up after them, and the lack of mandatory leash laws turned a child's daily walk home from school (me being the child in question) into an impromptu episode of Wild Kingdom.

Long Weekend is the first feature film for Australian director Colin Eggleston, and the first feature-length original screenplay from American writer Everett De Roche, who followed this up with the telekinesis thriller Patrick (1978)

I was a three-year-old when those national “Keep America Beautiful” anti-littering ads began appearing on television. I was 13 by the declaration of the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970). By age 14, Italian-American actor Iron Eyes Cody debuted as the teary-eyed Native American in a long-running series of national anti-litterbug PSAs. Seventies headlines not devoted to the war in Vietnam or our crumbling democracy were devoted to news of man-made ecological disasters, panic-pieces on the dangers of nuclear power, and the ecological risks posed by pesticides, deforestation, and unchecked industrial waste.

In the shadow of a senseless war, government corruption, and economic collapse, the rapidly deteriorating environmental landscape came to mirror the American public's eroding faith in its leaders and institutions. It has always been a given that self-annihilation was the inevitable endgame of man's inhumanity to man, but when this callous disregard for existence looked to extend itself to the destruction of innocent wildlife and the environment as a whole, motion pictures took up the cathartic mantle of providing defenseless mother Nature with a melodramatic avenue of recourse: violent resistance.

John Hargreaves as Peter

Briony Behets as Marcia

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), while lacking the kind of environmentalist score-settling that later came to typify the genre, is considered one of the earliest examples of “man vs. nature” horror. A few undistinguished low-budget thrillers like 1966's The Deadly Bees followed, but it took the sleeper success of Willard (1971)—with its supporting cast of rampaging rodents—to really spearhead the “animals on the attack” craze of the 1970s. Many of these films, especially Jaws (1975)...perhaps the most successful and influential film of this ilk, simply inserted members of the animal kingdom into the old Drive-In movie sci-fi and monster movie template (Grizzly – 1976, Orca - 1977, The White Buffalo - 1977, Nightwing - 1979, Night of the Lepus). 

Others, like King Kong (1976) and The Swarm (1978) outfitted the old-fashioned monster movie with trendy environmentalist themes and restructured it to conform to the then-popular disaster film mold. But it was movies with titles like Food of the Gods (1976), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Empire of the Ants (1977), and Day of the Animals (1977) that established ecological horror as a standalone exploitation subgenre which sought to extract allegorical lessons from man’s abuse of the environment and nature's violent revolt.  

Long Weekend, a 1978 Australian entry in the eco-horror cycle, is said to be a classic example of “Ozploitation”—the low-budget, sensationalist branch of the indie-film boom that saw Aussie features like Walkabout (1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and Mad Max (1979) finding global popularity during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Unlike those films, Long Weekend was not a success in its home country, so its 1979 U.S. release came without benefit of advance word-of-mouth or much in the way of marketing fanfare. Which may go to explain why I’d never even heard of it before this year and why I don’t recall it having a Los Angeles release. More’s the pity. For Long Weekend is such an unexpectedly taut and atmospheric exercise in dread and character conflict, I know it would have been a favorite.

Long Weekend wins points right out of the gate in that it deftly combines elements of several of my favorite film styles: the domestic dysfunction drama (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Two for the Road, Closer ); the suspense thriller in which internal conflicts manifest as external threats (Black Swan, Images); the '70s disaster-survival film (The Poseidon Adventure); and the parapsychological haunted house movie (The Haunting).

Peter and Marcia, an unhappy couple living in the suburbs of Melbourne, embark, with polar opposite degrees of enthusiasm, on a trip to the Australian bush to camp, surf, and commune with nature over the course of a 4-day holiday weekend. Our introduction finds the attractive (if flinty) young couple barely on speaking terms: Marcia feeling Peter is behaving like “A real shit” for digging in his heels and dragging her off to rough it in the wild North when she’d much rather spend the weekend at a posh mountain resort with their neighbors Mark and Freda. Peter, a gung-ho, weekend-warrior type who fancies himself a rugged outdoorsman, finds Marcia's "I don't want to go" peevishness to be suspect (there are hints of infidelity), so he masks his passive-aggressive dominance (i.e., a total disinterest in anything Marcia wants) behind half-hearted conciliatory gestures.

"Peter, I'm not the type for crapping in the sunshine and yawning around campfires!"
Marcia's resistance to the whole camping ordeal finds her insulated from nature in an expensive tent surrounded by creature comforts while she reads Harold Robbins' trash novel "The Inheritors." On IMDB the book is mistaken for the thematically suitable novel of the same title by William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies. But alas, it's a more character-revealing novel about greed and wealth. 

As the two embark on their outing, encountering weather and traffic conditions which all but serve as banshee-screaming harbingers of doom urging the couple to “Go back!”, it isn't long before their ill-advised journey shows signs of becoming something of a metaphorical mystery tour. Past squabbles erupt, mutual dissatisfactions are aired, and along the way, a callous disregard for nature and the environment is evinced in terms reflective of their vacillating disregard for one another. It's in this manner that Long Weekend's cyclical (boomerang?) thematic structure is reinforced.
The gross discordancy of Peter and Marcia's relationship (like cast-out Adam and Eve, they are given no last names) visits itself upon their surroundings in such a way that the toxic bitterness of their interactions has the reverberative effect of despoiling the land and surrounding creatures until nature must, at last, intervene on life's behalf.

In an interview, the late Everett De Roche summarized the premise of his screenplay for Long Weekend as: “Mother Earth has her own auto-immune system, so when humans start behaving like cancer cells, She attacks.”

An unattended spear gun goes off, narrowly missing one of the campers. The already-evidenced supernatural energy of the campsite (frequently, nature is heard to scream or cry whenever attacked) has the tree to appear to die from the spear, as though mortally wounded

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I discovered Long Weekend after spending an afternoon watching Joan Collins in the deliciously tacky Empire of the Ants and logged onto IMDB to see where this rather embarrassing foray into ginormous papier-mâché insects fell in her lengthy resume (plop in the middle of a fallow spell four years before Dynasty came a-callin’). The site recommended similar titles, Long Weekend being among them, and based on the plot summary and my unfamiliarity with it, I was instantly intrigued. Wholly anticipating a fun & cheesy exercise in “When Good Animals Go Bad”-style, nature-run-amok horror, I was caught off guard (and pleasantly surprised) when Long Weekend turned out to be a suspenseful, genuinely frightening eco-thriller with a compellingly fucked-up marriage at its center.

I confess to the snarky, Albee-esque “George and Martha Go Camping” angle being my favorite element of Long Weekend, but I’m equally impressed by De Roche’s crisp screenplay and the economic style of Eggleston’s direction. Making the most of its modest budget: purposefully underpopulated, the film pulls off the impressive feat of making the great outdoors feel encroaching and claustrophobic; simple theme: all livings things have a right to their survival; and scenic locale: the film capitalizes on the ominously mystical quality of Australia’s undeveloped rural coast. Long Weekend tackles a great many sizable issues by training its lens on the details, and the result is an unexpectedly rich viewing experience.

Marcia and Peter's interactions are frequently filmed through foliage and from low, constantly
moving angles, as though they are being watched by some unseen forest creature 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The indestructibility of energy is a familiar theme in ghost stories and haunted house movies (how many films have used variations of the line “Evil never dies, it just changes form”?). In Long Weekend, humans are the generators of the malevolent energy that nature ultimately recycles and returns (with a vengeance) in a self-preservationist strike against the violent toxicity of mankind’s jackboot ecological footprint. Whereas a great many eco-horror films are built on the premise of humans being terrorized by beasts and wildlife invading populated areas of safety, Long Weekend casts humans as the pernicious intruders and despoilers of nature's beauty.

"What have you been doing to the tree?"
"Chopping it down."
"Why?"
"Why not?"

Humanity’s entitled encroachment upon wildlife’s natural habitat is reflected in the film’s opening scenes which present Marcia, dressed in a green floral print, tending to her indoor plants (the “imprisoned” florae harkening back to the caged lovebirds in Hitchcock’s film), packing up a frozen chicken (which slips from her grasp, as though still alive and trying to escape), and ignoring a TV news report about flocks of cockatoos destroying homes in Sydney as they gnaw on the wood structures in an effort to correct a dietary imbalance brought about by overdevelopment. (A real-life problem that persists to this day in Australia.)

If Marcia is symbolic of mankind’s indifference to the environment (she would have Peter leave his dog alone for three days with one bowl of food “She’s too fat, anyway!”) Peter—with his arsenal of violent recreational camping equipment—is humanity at its most aggro. Peter’s master-of-all-he-surveys arrogance is evident in the couple’s ceaselessly acrimonious interactions; actions rooted in possessiveness, betrayal, and the corrupt values of affluence. He is the side of humanity that would seek to exert dominance over nature rather than contemplate a balanced coexistence.

Long Weekend is at its most unnervingly chilling when the corresponding themes of its cyclical structure (nearly everything that occurs in the latter part of the film has been telegraphed earlier) converge at the campsite, and the heretofore realist narrative grows sinisterly supernatural. Nature appears to respond defensively and in kind to the couple’s amplified aggressions, leading to the ultimate face-off…a tension-filled 20-minute third act without dialogue…which comes an unforgettable shock.

PERFORMANCES

Given my weakness for movies about screwed-up people in troubled relationships, I don’t hold to the axiom that characters in a film need to be likable. Interesting and sympathetic perhaps, or, more to the point, empathetic works for me. Marcia & Peter are a pretty unpleasant pair as protagonists go, but as realized by British actor Briony Behets (at the time, wife of the director), and Australian actor John Hargreaves (who is truly splendid), they are believable as hell, and therefore, their flaws and weaknesses are compelling. If there's a sympathetic character to be found in the film at all, it's Mother Nature, whose army of benign-appearing warriors manage somehow to be both cute and discomfiting.

Gay actor John Hargreaves won Best Actor for his work in Long Weekend at The Sitges Film Festival (specializing in horror and fantasy films) in 1978, beating out Laurence Olivier in Dracula, Donald Pleasance in Halloween, and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu. Hargreaves died of AIDS in 1996 and asked that his award be buried with him.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS  

The ‘70s are long gone, but in light of today’s concerns about global warming, climate change, and head-in-the-sand science deniers; I’d say the time was ripe for eco-horror movies to make a comeback. That is, until I happen to catch the news and am instantly reminded that we're all actually living IN an environmental horror movie. 

The third character in Long Weekend's three-character melodrama is the lush scenery of
Australia's Bournda State Reserve, New South Wales, and Phillip Island

From the leading lady’s Samantha Sang hairdo to the leading man’s short-shorts, Long Weekend looks every bit the 1977 film it is. But that doesn't mean it feels dated, nor does it prevent this Aussie import from still being one of the best of the Crimes Against Nature genre flicks. A timeless timepiece of suspense and retribution whose cautionary-tale take on the perils of pushing nature too far is (sadly) as relevant now as when it was made.

BONUS MATERIAL
Long Weekend was remade in 2008 by director Jamie Blanks from a screenplay by original screenwriter Everett De Roche. An Australian production that I believe went direct-to-video in the States (where it was given the awful title Nature's Grave).

This entertainingly faithful remake (down to duplicate shots and dialogue)

 stars Jim Caviezel and Claudia Karvan.

Screenwriter Everett De Roche makes a cameo appearance in the 2008 remake as a pub
patron at the Eggleston Hotel, named for original Long Weekend director Colin Eggleston

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2019

THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT 1964

When the world never seems to be living up to your dreams – "The Facts of Life" theme

A recent New York Times study found that most people’s music tastes peak somewhere around the ages of 13 to 16, concluding that as we age, we tend to gravitate to the music we listened to during our adolescence. I'm certain I would have balked at such a reductive claim back in my youth—given that throughout the '80s and '90s I listened to little else but what was played in heavy rotation on MTV. But today, having just turned 60, I skip right over the '80s and '90s and listen almost exclusively to early Motown, '70s disco, and ‘60s psychedelic pop...the music of my adolescence. 

I'm sure that had a comparable study been conducted about movies, the findings would be similar. That's definitely the case with me. I've long known that the films I fell in love with during my teenage years have played a significant role in the determining and shaping of my taste in motion pictures. Chiefly because they provided me with my earliest glimpses of adult life.
As a rule, when I was young I had little patience with movies featuring or marketed to kids my own age, and was chiefly drawn to movies about what I assumed was the infinitely more interesting world of grown-ups. But every now and then I came upon an exception.

Movies have explored the lives of teenagers in a great many coming-of-age films, but few have captured that curiously cocooned, exuberant, outside-adulthood-looking-in, bittersweet limbo state known as adolescence as fancifully as George Roy Hill’s The World of Henry Orient. A thoroughly enchanting and enduring comedy-drama about friendship, found families, and the efficacy of imagination in coping with the imperfect world of flawed adults and inadequate caretakers.

Peter Sellers as Henry Orient

Paula Prentiss as Stella Dunnworthy

Angela Lansbury as Isabel Boyd

Elizabeth "Tippy" Walker as Valerie Campbell Boyd

Merrie Spaeth as Marian Gilbert

Henry Orient (Peter Sellers) is a vainglorious, not overly-gifted avant-garde concert pianist whose life (which consists of surprisingly little piano playing and considerable skirt-chasing) is turned upside down by the worshipful attentions of a pair of dreamy teenage girls who have decided to make him the object of their romantic fantasies. The girls in question are eighth-graders Valerie Boyd (Tippy Walker) and Marian Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth). Both are new enrollees at the tony Norton’s School for Girls in Manhattan's Upper East Side who establish a rapport over shared orthodontic burdens (i.e., braces: Marian has “rubber bands,” Val sports “railroad tracks”). Plus, a mutual appreciation of their temple of learning:

Val: “Do you like it?”

Marian: “They say it’s the finest girls' school in the country.”

Val: “I don’t either.”

But chiefly they share an inarticulate loneliness and the 14-year-old’s gift for filling the void of unsatisfactory home lives with an immersion in vivid flights of fancy.

"Gil" and "Val" (as they call one another) dream about the ideal family life

Valerie, a born fantasist, is musically gifted and branded a misfit at school due to her high IQ and family-rooted developmental problems (“I’m unmanageable,” she boast-confesses about being kicked out of two schools in one year). Traipsing about New York with disheveled hair and wearing an old, full-length mink (a hand-down from her mother, no doubt), she suffers the neglect of wealthy, globe-trotting parents (Angela Lansbury and Tom Bosley). Marian, an impressionable pragmatist of humbler circumstances than her private school peers (“Don’t tell me you finally found a friend in that snob hatchery!”), comes from a loving but broken home where she’s looked after by her divorced mother (Phyllis Thaxter) and materteral family friend, “Boothy” (Bibi Osterwald). 

Bibi Osterwald as Erica "Boothy" Booth and Phyllis Thaxter as Mrs. Avis Gilbert
 taking in a Henry Orient concert: "If this is music, what's that stuff Cole Porter writes?"

When a string of fateful, frightful coincidences consistently throw Val and Marian into the path of the playboy pianist --literally, in one instance--the girls, convinced of destiny’s intervention, swear blood-oath, lifelong devotion to their beloved. That Val & Marian’s ardent attentions come to inadvertently wreak havoc on Henry’s attempts to seduce a very-married patron of the arts (the wonderful Paula Prentiss, stealing every scene) is where The World of Henry Orient finds its humor. That the eyes of a couple of quixotic 14-year-olds can transform a mediocre musician and world-class phony into the fulfilled embodiment of all that is artistically pure and romantic in life is where The World of Henry Orient finds its heart.

"And then two small bladders came out of their mouths!"
Henry Orient describing his first sighting of Val and Marian 

Set in a romanticized New York that never existed (something the film’s young stars were dismayed to discover when in real-life they reenacted the scene where a concerned mob rushes to the aid of one of the girls as she feigns illness on a busy city street [in real-life, apathetic pedestrians merely stepped over them]), The World of Henry Orient celebrates the emotional resiliency of the young, suggesting that a fertile imagination is ofttimes the only line of defense afforded those vulnerable souls whose fate it is to make the best of the messes adults make of their lives.

That both comedy and dramatic conflict arise out of the struggle to maintain a hopeful dreaminess in the face of disillusionment and the inevitable eye-opening of maturity is what makes The World of Henry Orient an uncommonly insightful film about teenagers that also contains a few lessons for adults.

The Family You Create Can Be More Important Than The One You're Born Into
A particularly well-played and sensitively written scene has Mrs. Gilbert and Boothy, in an empathetic effort to make Val feel less self-conscious about her daily visits to a psychiatrist, both confess (to the surprise of Marian) to having "hit the couch" at one time or another in their past.

The timeline of its release and its favorable reception places The World of Henry Orient right at the start of the "youth wave" in motion pictures. Released one year after the first Beach Party movie—a genre noted for its overage teens and absentee parents—The World of Henry Orient is distinguished by being a film about adolescents whose stars are actually adolescents (Walker and Spaeth were 16 and 15, respectively). 

Like Disney’s The Parent Trap (released two years earlier), The World of Henry Orient, too, is about teens from broken homes, but its approach isn't as sanitized. The World of Henry Orient came out two years before another Hayley Mills film-The Trouble with Angels, and shares with it the rarefied status of being a major motion picture featuring female protagonists...their relationships and points of view...as the central focus of the narrative.

Based on Nora Johnson's debut novel first published in 1958, The World of Henry Orient was inspired by her New York childhood and the adolescent crush she harbored for pianist Oscar Levant (Levant is the French word for Orient, explaining the title character’s unusual last name). It was adapted for the screen by her father, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, How to Marry a Millionaire, Black Widow), whose extensively reworked screenplay is purported to have been completed without his daughter’s participation, but (perhaps in an effort to make up for being such a non-presence in her early life...the Johnsons divorced when Nora was five) he nevertheless granted her a co-writing credit and billing above his own.

Old-School Fangirls
The World of Henry Orient was released a month before The Beatles' first visit to the U.S. 

As autobiographical first novels go, Nora Johnson’s paean to the power of imagination to compensate for the absence of parental attention was the teenage antithesis to Françoise Sagan’s 1954 mordant memoir Bonjour Tristesse (written when Sagan was 18, Johnson’s when she was 25). While both books benefited from unsentimental perspectives, the essentially optimistic teens of Henry Orient were far more recognizable to American audiences than Sagan's cynical sophisticate. Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay lightened the tone of his daughter’s novel, fashioning it into a delightful, genuinely witty comedy with humor derived from character as much as calamity.

Noteworthy for the appealingly natural performances of its two leads, the film improves upon the book by eliminating Val’s therapist and fleshing out the girls' relationships with the adult characters via a three-pronged structure that matches the plot's shifting narrative perspective with corresponding variations in tone.

Henry Orient's offbeat piano concerto (featuring a factory whistle and a bass drum struck by a sack of potatoes) was composed by Ken Lauber, who appears in the film as the exasperated conductor

First, there's the coming-of-age comedy, which follows the breezy adventures of two girls loose in a picture-postcard vision of New York. Then there's the bedroom farce, which chronicles Henry's broadly-played attempts to seduce Stella. Finally, we have the adult satire which presents the adults of Henry Orient as the reality counterpoint to the fantasy world the girls have created for themselves. As the movie explores the differing ways in which children and adults deal with life's disappointments, The World of Henry Orient never once condescends to the girls, nor does it make all adults out to be fools or villains. Rather, the film treats all the characters with wry affection and a surprising amount of empathy.  

Paula Prentiss's elegant eccentricity brightens every scene. I can't--nor do I want to---watch anyone else.
She and Sellers reteamed the following year in What's New, Pussycat?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As a kid who spent a great deal of his adolescence in a paradoxical effort to both escape into and find myself within the flickering images of a movie screen; what I most relate to in The World of Henry Orient is the way it so entertainingly dramatizes the way young people, nonautonomous and dependent upon parents, can find temporary happiness in substituting dreams for reality when that reality is found wanting.

The film makes its points in emotionally perceptive ways. In particular, I like the scene where Val and Marian share a secret smile when the clock strikes six, the time of the day Marian confesses to most missing her absent and remarried father.

The film's only sour notes come when the girls, taking their cue from their idol's last name, lapse into the kind of non-malicious, yet nonetheless cringe-inducing, stereotypical Asian behavior (broken English, bowing) that we now recognize as casual racism. While nothing on the scale of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the scenes are still plenty embarrassing and ultimately disappointing. 

Special mention must also be made of Elmer Bernstein's splendid musical score which enlivens every scene, and the sensational New York locations. It makes Manhattan look like a kids' Playland.

PERFORMANCES

There are exceptions, but as a rule, I’m inclined to find most child actors annoying. They’re like some kind of dreamscape hybrid creature--juvenile bodies possessed of a lifetime’s worth of artifice and affectation. Paradoxically, I’m not much fonder of the practice of pawning off getting-on-in-years actors like Ann-Margret (Bye Bye Birdie) and John Travolta (Grease) as high-schoolers either, but of the two, I find adults posing as kids to be less grating. Therefore, the biggest miracle and greatest source of delight in The World of Henry Orient are the relaxed, genuinely likable performances given by its two age-appropriate, unknown, inexperienced leads making their film debuts. 

With her deliciously icy turn as Val’s disinterested mother, the ever-faultless Angela Lansbury was more than ready to bring a close to nearly two decades’ worth of playing unsympathetic character roles. She ultimately traded in her withering gaze and wry delivery for twinkly smiles and Broadway musical-comedy legend status. TV-familiar Tom Bosley (Happy Days) is very good as the distracted dad, but at 35 to Lansbury’s 37, Bosley felt he was “A little too young to be Angela’s husband.”

I don’t know how George Roy Hill did it, but Walker and Spaeth give such spirited, engagingly unselfconscious performances that it's hard to believe this is their first film. (One unsavory contributing factor perhaps influencing Walker's performance is that during filming, the married-with-children, 44-year-old director embarked on a creepy, purportedly platonic “relationship” with the 16-year-old former model which lasted several years). The quality of the young women's work (particularly Walker, who’s so heartbreaking in the film’s third act) is made all the more remarkable when contrasted with the patent amateurishness of the two equally inexperienced teenage girls cast by William Castle (per his usual copycat fashion) in  I Saw What You Did (1965). Trade periodicals from the time reveal that The World of Henry Orient was originally envisioned as a vehicle for Hayley Mills and Patty Duke, but I can’t imagine either of those seasoned vets improving upon the performances of these charismatic novices.

Character actor Al Lewis (aka "Grandpa" Munster) is a riot as a shopkeeper
 who fervently wants to be of assistance to Jayne Mansfield

Having made a splash in Lolita (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), and Dr. Stangelove (1964), The World of Henry Orient was Peter Sellers’ first American film. Renowned for his skill in playing multiple roles in several of his films, I am nevertheless relieved that Sellers only plays one part in The World of Henry Orient, for as much as I like him, a little of Sellers can go a very long way. His top-billed role here is more of a showy guest star turn, the innate theatricality of the self-enchanted Orient allowing Sellers to shine in a brilliantly exaggerated manner, while simultaneously preventing him from overstaying his welcome. His Henry Orient is one of my favorite Sellers performances precisely because it's one of the few to actually leave me wanting more.
The most lauded and commented-upon aspect of his characterization (deservedly so) is the way the Brooklyn born pianist’s accent keeps slipping from Bulgarian, French, Italian, and back to Brooklynese, depending on the situation. When on the make, his Henry Orient comes across like a guy who learned about seduction from watching reruns of Renso Cesana as The Continental. 

"I will give someone 1,000 dinars who can find one gray hair on my head!"
My partner harbors such a deep-rooted antipathy towards Peter Sellers that I actually resorted to trickery to get him to watch The World of Henry Orient. I began the film after the opening credits had rolled, and my partner fell in love with the film before he even recognized it was Peter Sellers (he thought it was Gene Kelly in "The Pirate" mode).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

There’s no arguing that representation matters, but in the movies and TV shows of the ‘60s, adolescent girls almost exclusively saw themselves represented in ways subordinate to and reflective of a negative adolescent male perspective (“Dumb ol’ Margaret” in Dennis the Menace, or “creepy” Judy in Leave it to Beaver). The lone exceptions and only TV programs I recall in which the lives and relationships of adolescent girls were central and presented as genuine were The Patty Duke Show and Gidget.

There have always been motion pictures with teenage girls as central characters within the framework of larger, family-centric stories: i.e., A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Actress (1953), and Pollyanna (1960). And some—like Margie (1946), A Date with Judy (1948), and the “Tammy” and “Gidget” franchises—even placed teenage girls front-and-center of their own stories. Unfortunately, the storylines of these films were so often devoted to the heroine’s romantic misadventures that all other female characters were depicted as either rivals or bullies. Female friendships were a rarity.

“One thing about unwanted children, they soon learn how to take care of themselves”

Val and Marian’s liberating flights of fantasy are repeatedly intruded upon by adults (the concerned crowd, the overly-helpful shopkeeper, the parent with no respect for privacy), all events that underscore themes relating to the vulnerability of adolescence and the sometimes-dispiriting lack of control the young have over their circumstances.

I grew up in a house with four sisters drawn to (and catching me up in their orbit) entertainments centered around female characters. Unfortunately, for these four beautiful, vibrant Black girls with imagination and confidence to spare, images of themselves in movies and TV during the '60s were virtually non-existent, except as totems of white tolerance in special “social problem” episodes of their favorite TV shows. Even during the ‘70s, when I could find glimpses of my own existence in the teenage Black males at the center of The Learning Tree (1969), Sounder (1972), and Cooley High (1975); I can think of only one film from the entire decade that was about a black teenage girl: Ossie Davis’1972 film Black Girl.

Local Color
Angela Lansbury's Tony Award-winning turn in Broadway's Mame was still two years off, but this party scene looks like an early dry-run for the "It's Today!" number. The only scene in the film to significantly feature actors of color, its objective is to illustrate her character's high-style sophistication

Forced to live within themselves and cling to any depiction of girlhood they could get (movie-wise, Hayley Mills and Annette Funicello were pretty much it), all of my sisters responded enthusiastically to The World of Henry Orient when it aired on TV. None more so than my next-to-oldest sister, the film buff and Beatles fan who dragged me to The Trouble with Angels more times than I can count, and for whom The World of Henry Orient was something of a mirror into her life. To say she liked this movie is a serious understatement. This film spoke to her.

A Catholic school girl well-acquainted with feeling like a misfit, my sister was Val to her best girlfriend’s Gil; together they would spend entire Saturdays roaming the city of Denver, Colorado (where we lived before moving to San Francisco) creating mischief and having adventures. When she watched The World of Henry Orient—which she did, rapturously, every time it aired—it was clear to me that the big smile on her face was a smile of recognition. Not physical recognition, for no one in the film looked like her at all (it would be many years before she ever saw an authentic depiction of herself onscreen), but emotional recognition: I could tell she was responding to seeing just a little bit of her inner self reflected back to her from the TV screen.

Black Girl Excellence
An unforeseen reaction to my seeing Annie (2014): a multimillion-dollar musical built around a 10-year-old Black girl (Quvenzhane Wallis): and Black Panther (2018): a global blockbuster featuring a 16-year-old Black girl who is a science genius and warrior (Letitia Wright); was how often I found myself brought to tears watching these beautiful young women, thinking about what such images would have meant to my sisters growing up.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

If part of our contemporary pop culture (fashion, the music industry) appears to be in a race to have girls acquire the tools to sexualize and objectify themselves as early as possible, another part (books, films, TV, behind-the-scenes production) feels as though it is listening to the creative and artistic voices of women and girls of all types. With more women—gay, straight, trans, Black, Asian, Latina—telling their own stories and becoming involved in the fields of writing, directing, and producing; I look forward to the day when there are more movies about the lives and friendships of girls. When a movie like The World of Henry Orient is more the cinematic norm than the rapturous rarity it remains.

BONUS MATERIAL

In 1967 The World of Henry Orient was turned into a flop Broadway musical. Both the film's director and screenwriter collaborated on the stage production which ran a scant three months, garnered two Tony Award nominations, and featured Golden Age 20th-Century Fox musical star Don Ameche in the Peter Sellers role. The show, if remembered at all, is cited for the participation of a young Pia Zadora, the dances by choreographer Michael Bennett, and the appearance of several original members of A Chorus Line.

Twenty years after playing the unhappily-married Boyds in The World of Henry Orient, Angela Lansbury and Tom Bosley reunited on considerably more amicable terms as author Jessica Fletcher and Sheriff Amos Tupper on the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote. 

AUTOGRAPH FILES

I wish I could remember something about the circumstances surrounding getting this Tom Bosley autograph. In its stead, I suppose I should be grateful that I at least recorded the date.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH 1971

I remember having had a dismissive reaction to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death when ads for the low-budget feature began appearing in the newspaper during the summer of 1971. I was never much into horror in those days, my tendency to take them too seriously spoiling all the intended fun of being scared, so the somewhat jocular tone of the title only cemented my resolve to leave the film alone. 

My older sister, a horror enthusiast and the only one of us kids to make it through the broadcast TV premiere of Psycho in 1967, went to see “Jessica” and had raved about it, but I couldn’t be swayed. Jump ahead to the late-‘70s.
Films like Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) had turned me into, if not exactly a bonafide horror hound, then certainly an individual more appreciative of the genre and its power to do more than simply offer up the odd shiver and gasp. By this time I'd also come to be aware of actress Zohra Lampert via her appealing but brief appearance as Warren Beatty's make-do wife in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass. A unique and talented two-time Tony Award nominee with an Actor’s Studio pedigree, Lampert was so unlike the type of actress one usually finds in horror movies, I was intrigued.
Happily, by this time Let’s Scare Jessica to Death had become something of a staple on late-night TV and local Creature Features-style programs.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death's eventual status as a cult film grew out of these wee-small-hours-of-the-morning broadcasts, but as far as I was concerned, if there was ever a film one should not be introduced to via the accompaniment of frequent commercial interruptions; intrusive, mood-killing host segments; and the murky dimness of pre-HD TV, it’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Already dealt a death blow with a grossly misleading shocker title that sets the viewer up for deathly scares that never materialize, the addition of commercials and comedy bumpers completely blows Let’s Scare Jessica to Death's deliberate pacing and low-simmer disquietude straight to hell. The first time I saw it, Let's Scare Jessica to Death felt like the slowest, darkest (as in underlit), least-eventful horror film I’d ever seen. I only made it through about 30 minutes before I grew impatient with waiting for something to happen. Nearly 30 years would pass before we’d meet again and I'd come to realize that when it comes to certain films, patience is definitely a virtue.  

Zohra Lampert as Jessica

Barton Heyman as Duncan

Mariclare Costello as Emily

Kevin O'Connor as Woody

Following the death of her father, New Yorker Jessica (who appears to be a folk artist of some sort) suffers a nervous breakdown and is institutionalized for six months. Upon her release, Jessica's husband Duncan quits his job as cellist for the New York Philharmonic, and in the interest of starting a new life, sinks all of their savings into the purchase of a 19^th Century farmhouse and apple orchard in a remote rural section of Connecticut. With the help of their family friend, Woody, Jessica and Duncan embark on their pilgrimage, Jessica (whom it’s alluded has had no say or hand in the selection of the house) expending considerable energy in trying to convince them...and herself...that all is “fine” and that the ever-escalating doubts she harbors about the state of her sanity are baseless. But they aren't.
Almost immediately upon arrival, Jessica begins hearing voices and experiencing what she believes to be hallucinations, but she's afraid to voice her concerns. Not an easy task, given that their new home looks like it was once owned by The Munsters and that its history is attached to a macabre local vampire legend. Adding further fuel to Jessica's mental health fires, the nearby town is totally devoid of women and populated exclusively by bandaged, oddly antagonistic, old men. 

Upon moving in, Jessica discovers their new home to be occupied by a beautiful hippie interloper ("squatter" is such an inelegant word, don’t you find?) named Emily, whom she invites to stay, much to the barely-contained delight of both Duncan and Woody. Unfortunately, this act of hippie-era generosity sets into motion a series of events that exposes the new tenants to a deadly, ages-old supernatural threat and stoke the fires of madness leading to Jessica’s mental and emotional disintegration.

Gretchen Corbett as The Girl in White

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It was 2010 before I ever sat down and watched Let’s Scare Jessica to Death in its entirety. By which time the middling state of contemporary horror films had given me an appreciation of the very things I once hadn't cared for in this movie back when I first saw it in 1978. In fact, its depiction of post-60s hippiedom is so evocative that I really wish I had seen it during its initial 1971 release. It perfectly captures the feel of what I recall about ‘70s-era Berkeley: a time when many of the privileged Bay Area hippies grew tired of playing at being poor and either resettled, en masse, in Mill Valley, or seized up ll the old Victorian houses around Berkeley and renovated them. Most of these post-'60s hippies looked a great deal like the cast of this movie. 

But I digress.  

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is largely a mood-piece vampire film, another in the 1970s female vampire movie trend (Daughters of Darkness, The Velvet Vampire) which cribbed liberally from the 1872 Gothic novel Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu that predated Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 26 years. Although it has a couple of scenes that made me start and got the hairs on my neck to stand up, it’s principally one of those horror movies I’d categorize as disturbing. It’s get-under-your-skin creepy rather than jump out of your seat scary. A genuinely unsettling horror movie that works on a number of levels, all playing to things like paranoia, the fluidity of reality, and the human capacity to make the ordinary look sinister if we try hard enough. 

Relatable Horror
Let's Scare Jessica to Death plays on everyday fears: shadowy hallways, whispered voices, and unexplained noises. In this instance, the dreaded "Something's grabbed my leg!!"  terror of every outdoor swimmer.

To its benefit, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death tries to do something different with the tropes of the vampire genre; giving a nod to tradition here and there (whether treated reverentially or casually, impending death remains a constant presence), but deviating from the expected in interesting ways. For instance, I like how the vampire, a bride who drowned just before her wedding 100 years ago, doesn’t have fangs, wears white, and, in lieu of biting a victim's neck as a means of blood extraction, uses the knife intended for her wedding cake.

Because the film is largely concerned with creating a haunting mood of menace and dread, not a lot of what occurs actually adds up logically. But the central conceit of presenting the film from Jessica’s subjective, arguably splintered, point of view, allows for narrative murkiness to work in the film’s favor.

Flirting with Death
They drive around in a hearse, her husband's cello case looks like a coffin, and
Jessica's hobby is visiting graveyards to make tombstone rubbings

PERFORMANCES

The strength of Zohra Lampert’s performance is so persuasive that I tend to (mistakenly) regard Let’s Scare Jessica to Death as a character-based horror film. It’s not, its characters are sketchily written at best, and while uniformly good, few of the other actors register beyond par-for-the-course for the exploitation horror genre. Mariclare Costello brings an assured, assertive quality to a character meant to be enigmatic. The likable Kevin O’Connor (who portrayed Humphrey Bogart in the truly dreadful 1980 TV-movie, Bogie) falls victim to tonsorial trendiness: little in the way of a performance is allowed to emerge from behind those huge sideburns, that enormous mane of styled ‘70s hair, and his Ned Flanders mustache.

I quite like Barton Heyman (who some might remember as the physician subjecting poor Linda Blair to all those tests in The Exorcist), as the overconcerned husband. He has several moments where he conveys a protective fear and resigned sympathy for Jessica that makes you wish his role were better written.

But the film is unimaginable without the superb Zohra Lampert. Her Jessica is a Master Class in how an inventive, skilled actor can put ten times more onscreen than is found on the written page. With almost nothing to work with beyond “neurotic,” Lampert (Warren Beatty’s shy bride in 1961’s Splendor in the Grass) sidesteps the clichés of the “woman in peril” and makes Jessica a complex, richly realized, wholly unique (and heartbreaking) character you can’t take your eyes off of. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Beyond the compelling vulnerability, Zohra Lampert brings to the character of Jessica, I find myself most drawn to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death’s sustained atmosphere of dreamlike creepiness. How it's achieved is clearly deliberate in some instances: the unsettlingly calm shots of the misty cove and surrounding forest; the angled, shadowy claustrophobia of the farmhouse. In others, it’s just as obviously the result of happy accidents: the film’s low-rent production values lend the film a turbid, documentary quality that makes every shot look, to borrow a quote from MST3K, “Like someone’s last known photograph.” 

Another asset, one that’s proved instrumental to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death's cult reputation, is its one-size-fits-all ambiguity. Presented with the prospect that all the events we witness are filtered through Jessica's neurotic gaze, the film opens itself up to myriad interpretations.

Lesbian Panic
One theory posits that the film is a hallucinatory delusion born of Jessica's
friendly/fearful attraction to the sensual Emily 

In making his directorial debut, John D. Hancock (Bang the Drum Slowly - 1973) has cited Henry James' The Turn of the Screw as a direct influence, yet he also readily admits that several of the most tantalizingly obtuse elements in the film aren’t exactly pertinent pieces of an intricately thought-out puzzle. If the séance sequence and the appearance of the mysterious girl in white seem to make no sense and appear to have no connection to the plot, it’s for good reason: both were included at the suggestion of an exhibitor, and the insistence of the producer, respectively.

Feminist Revenge
Another theory sees the film through the prism of Jessica's response to her father's death and 
repressed feelings of hostility/resentment toward her disloyal and infantilizing husband. 

Such is the interactive magic and power of movies, apropos of the horror genre, especially. If you succeed in engaging the audience on a visceral level, to reach them through means of visual theory and emotional engagement, then their imaginations will always work to fill in the plot holes and gaps of logic. For me, Let's Scare Jessica to Death isn't a horror film that works in spite of it not making much sense, it works specifically because it doesn't make much sense. 

The Madwoman in the Attic
Let's Scare Jessica to Death shares with other atmospheric Gothics like The Innocents, Rosemary's Baby, and The Haunting, a heroine whose questionable sanity brands her an unreliable narrator. Ironically, by fade-out, most of these films tend to end on a note of "I Believe the Woman."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

Something occurred to me while watching (as much as I could stomach) the horrorshow that was the 2018 SCOTUS hearings. It occurred to me that one of the things that has come to most characterize the current American socio-political climate has been the emergent spectacle of the hysterical male. They’ve always been around, these bastions of toxic/fragile masculinity, but never before has there been such a public parade of wild-eyed, blubbering, irrational, excitable, over-emotional (largely white and heterosexual) men, frothing at the mouth over an incapability of aligning an antiquated, deluded self-image to an evolving reality.

Eve Was Weak
Jessica is about to pick an apple from their recently sprayed orchard
 before Duncan warns her that it's poison

When explored in films at all, the phenomenon of the hysterical male has featured most often in the context of the paranoid thriller: films where a disbelieved male (whom the audience knows is actually right) fights a corrupt system. But given their visible abundance in real life, it's surprising to think how seldom the hysterical male appears in horror films.
Given that masculinity is a social construct only slightly less sturdy than the membrane lining an eggshell, it would seem a natural vulnerability topic for the horror genre; but Gothic tradition has long deemed the psychotic woman to be the defining trope of helplessness. When the psychotic man appears in horror, instead of being depicted as a victim or weak figure (which likely wouldn't sit too well with the genre's sizable male fanbase) his hysteria is inevitably framed in terms of his being an agent of violence or figure of fear.  

"It's OK Jess, I saw it, too."
Encouraged by her mental illness not to trust her own perceptions, Jessica frequently looks to the men in her life to validate her reality. A fine dramatic conceit for a horror film, but one which also reflects a very real (and tiresome) social mindset 

The theme of feminine fragility is a common one in horror films, and Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is no exception when it comes to Jessica’s tenuous grip on reality being both the focus of the film’s dramatic tension and the source of the audience’s emotional involvement. Jessica screams, shrieks, and wails while the men remain at a stoic, emotional remove. Even when she voices perfectly reasonable concerns regarding the strange behavior of the townsfolk or the appearance of the girl in white, the men’s uncurious and dismissive reactions reinforce the genre’s need to render unreliable a woman’s account of her own experience. In horror, women are emotional, the men are rational and sound.

Screams, whispers, and odd noises punctuate the sound design of Let's Scare Jessica to Death.
Another major asset is composer Orville Stoeber's bloodcurdling score.

Standing in contrast to Gothic traditionalism and the theme of "the disbelieved woman" is the gender-based disruption introduced by the character of Emily. In horror films, a female vampire is depicted in ways not dissimilar to that of the femme fatale in film noir. Her power lies in her awareness of men's vulnerability to her sexual allure. She has both agency and control over her fate because men are such easy prey. 

The horror film to explore the terrors of male fragility is perhaps yet to be made, but in having Jessica’s non-stop self-regulating offset by the consequences Duncan and Woody pay for their smug male self-assurance, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is spared from being just another Madwoman in the Attic horror Gothic.

BONUS MATERIAL

There's a good reason why the female performances in Let's Scare Jessica to Death register so strongly.  Zohra Lampert and Mariclare Costello were both members of the prestigious Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center. In 1964 they appeared together in the debut American production of Arthur Miller's After The Fall which also featured Jason Robards and Faye Dunaway.

In 1980 Mariclare Costello appeared as Mary Tyler Moore's 
sister-in-law Audrey in the film Ordinary People

I sit here and I can’t believe that it happened. And yet I have to believe it.

 Dreams or nightmares…madness or sanity. I don’t know which is which. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018