THE BLUES BROTHERS 1980

"We're on a mission from God."

The first thing I think about when I think about The Blues Brothers is that it opened in Los Angeles on the exact same day as Can't Stop the Music. Yes, on Friday, June 20^th, 1980, two big-budget, heavily-promoted Hollywood musicals played within blocks of one another on Hollywood Boulevard. One R-rated, the other PG, each a pre-fab pre-marketed project pitched to a specific (polar opposite) audience demographic. The timing of the release of Cant Stop The Music couldn't have been less fortuitous; the unanticipated success of The Blues Brothers spearheaded an R&B music resurgence and spawned a dreadful sequel. But as dissimilar as these two films appear to be on the surface, they have much in common.

Both are expensive pop musicals structured as the fictionalized biographies of real-life "manufactured" musical acts that found unexpected success and a curious form of legitimacy during the late 1970s. I say curious because, to some extent, both The Blues Brothers and The Village People are novelty acts that were taken seriously as musicians after becoming chart-topping record sellers and popular touring acts. The acts themselves: The Village People was chiefly a collection of costumed dancers marching behind a talented lead vocalist; The Blues Brothers, two costumed Saturday Night Live alumni assuming alter-identity roles as the fictional characters fronting a band of genuinely accomplished musicians. 

as "Joliet" Jake Blues

as Elwood Blues

It can be argued that both bands benefited significantly from white America's preference for the watered-down interpretations of musical styles rooted in the Black American experience. Disco having developed from dance R&B and funk, while the blues came out of jazz and classic R&B. The "novelty act" identities of both bands was a form of winking pop-cultural pretense allowing the bands to market themselves in ways that expanded their appeal beyond the scope of their music. The Greenwich Village "types" that gave the Village People their costuming enabled the band to have it both ways: they were a gay band for those who "got" the coding; to the rest, they were just a party band. The Blues Brothers more or less updated an ages-old music industry trope: white audience resistance to Black artists allows mediocre covers performed by white musicians to outdistance the far earthier (re: too Black) originals.

To achieve the kind of mainstream success necessary to turn a profit, the PG-rated, $20 million Can't Stop the Music needed to downplay The Village People's gay disco origins and hopefully attract the same clueless pop/teen record-buying audience that incredibly never picked up on the group's homoerotic costuming or the gay subtext of songs like YMCA and Macho Man.

For The Blues Brothers to succeed, this R-rated, $27 million well-intentioned "Tribute to African- American music" (sentiments expressed by both Aykroyd & Belushi) had to play up the faux "soul" personas of its two white male stars whose chief demographic, via SNL and Animal House, was 20-something straight white males. All the while exploiting the fleeting "guest star" presence of Black entertainers who were the genuine article: i.e., true legends from the worlds of blues, jazz, and R&B.

In short- Can't Stop the Music featured a gay band playacting as straight, and The Blues Brothers band featured two frontmen playacting at being Black. 

But that's where the similarities end. Can't Stop the Music banked everything on the enduring popularity of disco, but by the time the film hit theaters, disco had fallen out of favor. As a result, Can't Stop the Music died a swift and ignominious death at the boxoffice. The Blues Brothers, however, took a gamble on music that hadn't been popular among young people for many years. The film's unexpected blockbuster success sparked a renewed interest in classic R&B, and wound up rejuvenating the careers of the Black artists showcased in the movie.

In 1980, I was personally far too much into disco to even consider going to see The Blues Brothers, the first two weekends of its release finding me at the Paramount Theater (now The El Capitan) on Hollywood Blvd watching Can't Stop the Music playing to a near-empty house. I didn't actually see The Blues Brothers until after Xanadu had opened the following month. By then, the poorly-reviewed Belushi/Aykroyd starrer had already emerged as the hit of the summer... coming in second only to The Empire Strikes Back. 

I can't profess to ever have been a big fan of SNL, I've never seen Animal House, and the appeal of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd was largely lost on me. So when they began appearing in concert as The Blues Brothers, opening for a young Steve Martin, I was among those baffled by their success. I genuinely thought their chart-topping 1978 LP "Briefcase Full of Blues" was a comedy album. I suspect my reaction to The Blues Brothers as a legitimate musical act was very likely similar to how rock fans reacted to The Monkees in the '60s.

Chaka Khan has a cameo as a member of the Triple Rock Baptist Church choir

But despite my initial misgivings, John Landis' The Blues Brothers ultimately did more than win me over; I actually fell in love with it. This ragtag tale of two musical miscreants on a mission of reform took me back to my childhood; the film struck me as a hip update of those overblown slapstick chase comedies like The Great Race (1965), crossed with a hip Bob Hope Bing Crosby vibe, all added to one of those all-star cameo epics like Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Set in contemporary Chicago, the tone of The Blues Brothers and its depiction of Black culture is forever skirting the fine line between veneration and patronization (the Black artists are the supporting cast in a film dedicated to the music they invented). Still, the overall cleverness and humor of the film allow it to coast a great deal on good intentions, goodwill, and the exhilaration that comes from The Blues Brothers being a bang-up, enjoyably silly musical comedy.

Kathleen Freeman as Sister Mary Stigmata (The Penguin)

Carrie Fisher as the Mystery Woman

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
That The Blues Brothers is now considered by many to be a classic (and deservedly so, in my opinion) has much to do with its age. Now almost 40 years old, many of the film's biggest fans discovered it on cable TV as kids, citing it as the first R-rated movie they ever saw. It also doesn't hurt that the film was a major boxoffice success, ranking as the 10^th highest-grossing film of 1980. But, linked as it is to the glory days of SNL, The Blues Brothers earns its status as a classic because it's remembered fondly for its guest roster of musical greats. Even if you don't care for the film, there's no denying that something about The Blues Brothers seized the public's imaginations enough for the group to become a household name and pop phenomenon. And like the film it most resembles—the equally unwieldy and intermittently funny car chase comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) —The Blues Brothers is a product of a distinct era (the post-'70s blockbuster days of pre-CGI excess) and features the final or only screen appearances of several entertainment industry greats no longer with us. In that respect, it can't help but look great from a rear-view perspective.

John Candy as Corrections Officer Burton Mercer

I was a huge fan of The Blues Brothers in 1980, seeing it so many times I could repeat jokes and recite verbatim bits of dialogue. I still enjoy it a great deal, but upon revisiting it recently via the extended Blu-ray edition (approximately 15-minutes longer than the theatrical), it became clearer to me that the music and musical sequences are where my heart lies. They're so good they tend to make me forget that the deadpan give-and-take between Jake and Elwood can feel a little draggy. The film's soundtrack is a major saving grace, the personal nostalgia dredged up by the songs reminding me of the music my parents used to play around the house when I was a kid. It's only humor-wise where things start to get dicey for me. Aykroyd comes off as a nice kind of goofus type, but (and I know I'm alone in this) I honestly don't get Belushi's appeal. I kept waiting for him to catch fire on the screen, to show some flash of comic brilliance... but, zip. He starts out and remains a fairly inert presence. The contributions of the guest stars and cameos are fun, as are the almost surreal touches of over-scale lunacy that give the film the feel of a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Twiggy as The Chic Lady

But retro-romanticizing aside, I must confess that refamiliarizing myself with The Blues Brothers left me at a bit of a loss when it came to accessing what the hell I once thought was so outrageously funny about it all. Some bits still get me, like the scene where a car driven by Nazis launches off an unfinished freeway overpass to an absurdly high altitude. Or the way Elwood zeroes in on a toaster oven (a slice of white bread materializing from his pocket) while the band members examine musical instruments at Ray's shop. But did I really laugh that loud and long at the mere sight of so many scenes of cars crashing into one another back in 1980? (Answer: Yes.) Did I really not notice how women figure so marginally (and dismissively) in this puerile boys club demolition derby fantasy? (Regrettably, yes.)

The whole viewing experience reminded me of when I tried relistening to one of those '70s Cheech & Chong comedy albums that were all the rage when I was in high school. Verdict: WTF?

Henry Gibson as the Head Nazi

Comedy tastes change, I know. And while I never tire of some '70s comedies like What's Up, Doc? and Young Frankenstein, perhaps the style of comedy that came into vogue at the start of the '80s—the cocaine-fueled variety, anyway—just has a shorter shelf-life for me. (I'm equally immune to the comedy of early Steve Martin and Robin Williams.). The biggest laugh The Blues Brothers elicited from me this time around is courtesy of footage not even found in the original release. It's a scene where Cab Calloway explains to the band that Jake and Elwood plan to give the proceeds from their Palace Hotel concert to the orphanage. The band members' collective reaction is excellent. 

Steve Lawrence as Maury Sline

THE STUFF OF FANTASY  

For many, The Blues Brothers endures because of its standing as a filmed record of so many now-deceased legendary Black artists from the worlds of jazz, R&B, gospel, and blues. In a year that saw the release of many large-budget musical films--Xanadu, Popeye, Coal Miner's Daughter, The Apple, The Jazz Singer (which gave us Neil Diamond in blackface, fer chrissake), and Can't Stop the Music --The Blues Brothers was the only one with soul. Too bad the only way to access it was after Belushi and Aykroyd had relinquished the spotlight.

The Blues Brothers shines brightest in its musical interludes. And what a treat it is to see Aretha Franklin in her first movie appearance, James Brown singing gospel, Cab Calloway in Technicolor, and a street full of Chicago residents doing the twist to Ray Charles (the latter being the image that most stuck in my mind the first time I saw the film's trailer.)

Choreographed by the late Carlton Johnson (familiar to many as the sole Black male member of the Ernie Flatt Dancers on The Carol Burnett Show), each number is a standalone set piece staged with witty exuberance and cinematic panache.

My favorites, in order of preference:

Ray Charles - "Shake a Tailfeather"

Ray Charles really blows the roof off with his driving rendition of this upbeat R&B dance tune first sung by The Five Du-Tones in 1963, making it more than fitting that the number spills out into the Chicago streets, inspiring the first flash mob. Playing the proprietor of Ray's Music Exchange, where the band goes to purchase instruments, Charles' infectiously soulful vocals are so raw and playful that he fairly dares you to stay in your seat. Which makes it so ideal that the throngs of amateur dancers outside his store so enthusiastically accommodate his requests for a rundown of the popular dances of the '60s. I love absolutely everything about this number, which is the most assured in terms of choreography, staging, and editing. Just brilliant. Watch a clip of it HERE.

The center member of the Soul Food Chorus is Aretha Franklin's younger sister Carolyn

Aretha Franklin - "Think"

Although she briefly sang and acted in a 1971 episode of TV's Room 222, The Blues Brothers marks Aretha Franklin's film debut. Cast as the wife of Blues Hall of Fame inductee Matt "Guitar" Murphy, Franklin's now-iconic performance of her 1968 hit "Think" is both rousing and an uncontested high point in the film. Many consider it the best number in the film, something I wouldn't necessarily argue with, save for a quibble or two. No one can fault Franklin's peerless performance and star quality, but my problem (and this is likely due to the multiple takes required due to Franklin's discomfort with lip-syncing) but the editing feels soggy and screws with the song's rhythm. Plus the imprecise staging frequently leaves Franklin not knowing what to do with her arms or body as she waits for the next verse.  

James Brown - "The Old Landmark"

Jake and Elwood find religion and a higher purpose at the Triple Rock Baptist Church listening to the sermon of Rev. Cleophus James. And who wouldn't in the presence of The Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown? When the Reverend and his choir break into this 1949 gospel standard (which Brown had never heard of before) the church erupts into a jubilant revival production number that literally defies gravity. James Brown (a personal favorite) is dynamic as all get-out in this, the film's first musical set-piece, whose contagious energy and gymnastic, high-kicking dancers get things off to a very spirited start. 

Cab Calloway - Minnie the Moocher

A delightful moment that I recall brought a round of applause from the movie theater audience I saw this with, was when 72-year-old Cab Calloway, as Curtis, the janitor at the orphanage where Jake and Elwood were raised, entertains a restless audience by magically morphing into the 1930s incarnation of the Big Band Cab Calloway we all remember (transforming the stage and the motley band members along with him). In the theatrical release, this stylish highlight was marred by cutaways to the tardy Blues Brothers trying to make it to the theater. The restored Blu-ray allows us to see more of Calloway's hep rendition of his 1931 signature song. A song he co-penned with Irving Mills, and which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, five years after Calloway's death. 

Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) as a waiter at the Chez Paul restaurant

THE STUFF OF DREAMS   

As my partner can attest, a favorite phrase of mine is "Two things can be true at once." A phrase that comes in particularly handy when writing about film. Take, for example, the observation that Faye Dunaway is an unrepentant ham, while at the same time being an absolutely brilliant actress. Both are circumstantially true, resulting in the truth of one not negating the truth of the other. It's all a matter of perspective.

As per The Blues Brothers: It's true the film and its makers provide a respectful and, in some instances, classic showcase for Black artists ignored by Hollywood. It's a fact that Aykroyd and Belushi used the privilege of their fame and took a risk on the moneymaking potential of the film by insisting on hiring these legendary Black stars and featuring so many Black faces in the supporting cast. (Theater distributors like Mann's Westwood, not wanting what they perceived to be a "Black film" in their neighborhoods, wound up cutting The Blues Brothers opening venues by more than half.) It's also true The Blues Brothers was instrumental in a whole new generation of people discovering music and artists that white record companies and radio stations had long ignored. 

All that being said, it's also true that The Blues Brothers is almost embarrassing as an example of cultural appropriation. When my parents (who grew up on real blues and jazz) watched The Blues Brothers on cable TV many years ago, their takeaway was that the Black performances in the film reminded them of the days when Lena Horne would appear in isolated numbers in MGM musicals so that her scenes could be edited out when the films played in the South.

Subtextually, Black culture is used as a backdrop in The Blues Brothers, a thing Jake and Elwood have free access to lay claim to and use in any way they wish. Black music is theirs to perform, Black personas are theirs to adopt; all the while they're secure in the fact that they don't even have to be any good to succeed—they merely have to be Not Black. An unfortunate fact borne out by the music history statistic that both The Blues Brothers soundtrack and the aforementioned Briefcase Full of Blues rank as the top-selling blues albums of all time. My head hurts just thinking about that one. 

Critics of the film rightfully question whether the humor of The Blues Brothers 
is rooted in merely seeing whites occupying Black spaces

None of this should detract from the obvious merits of The Blues Brothers. It's mentioned merely to call attention to talking points and food for thought that's impossible to ignore when watching a nearly 40-year-old film.

I consider The Blues Brothers to be a classic, but to true fans of blues and R&B, Aykroyd and Belushi are a bit like the Jayne Meadows (wife of Steve Allen) and Nanette Newman (wife of director Bryan Forbes) of Soul: if you want to see Aretha Franklin and James Brown on the screen, you have to take Jake and Elwood in the bargain.

Steven Spielberg as the Cook County Office Clerk

BONUS MATERIAL
A poorly-received Blues Brothers sequel--Blues Brothers 2000--was made in 1998, some 16-years after John Belushi's death. Co-written by Aykroyd and Landis, this PG-13 misguided venture brought back several members of the original cast (Aretha Franklin, James, Brown, Steve Lawrence, Kathleen Freeman) but to less entertaining effect. Budgeted at  $28 million, it grossed something in the neighborhood of $14 million. I tried watching it, but the introduction of that kid Blues Brother did me in.

Choreographer Carlton Johnson staging Franklin's "Think" musical number

The sixty-minute 1998 behind-the-scenes documentary "The Stories Behind the Making of The Blues Brothers" is currently available on YouTube. Click Here.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2019

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