A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY 1968

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of movie marketing knows that any film calling itself A Quiet Place in the Country is certain to be set in a country locale that’s anything but. And by the same token, anyone remotely familiar with the works of Elio Petri—the Italian director/screenwriter of that Haute futuristic fantasm The Tenth Victim (1965) and the 1970 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner winner for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion—knows that any movie made by this unsung post-neorealist auteur is bound to be a barbed political allegory distinguished, in no small part, by a strikingly idiosyncratic visual style and a dynamic musical score.

Both presuppositions are realized to mind-blowing effect in A Quiet Place in the Country, an offbeat, exhilarating puzzle of a film that has a lot to say about man, muses, money, and madness. And it does so while oozing irresistible ‘60s-era inscrutability from every artfully-composed frame.

In this sequence, one of several punctuated by imagery alluding to contemporary and classic works of art, a faded beauty in a decaying villa (top r.) assumes a pose reminiscent of Jean-Louis David's 1800 Neoclassical portrait Madame Recamier (top l.). As the figure draws closer, the woman transforms into Rene Magritte's 1951 surreal parody, Perspective: Madame Recamier by David (bottom l.)

A Quiet Place in the Country is a Giallo-hued psychological thriller about the artist as outsider. A study in the creative alienation that charts one man's slow descent into madness as he wages war with inner demons and suppressed obsessions. In fashioning his subjectively fractured, paranoid vision of the world of art, Elio Petri takes simultaneous aim at consumerist culture and the moral decay that lies at its core. Specifically, the dehumanizing effects of the market-mandated practice of harnessing and harvesting creativity and artistic expression for the sake of profit.

A film that intriguingly combines diverse elements of style and genre, the tone of A Quiet Place in the Country shifts eerily--and joltingly--from dreamlike to nightmarish in service of a narrative that’s part murder mystery, part obsessive love story, and part horror film.

Vanessa Redgrave as Flavia

Franco Nero as Leonardo Ferri

Franco Nero is Leonardo Ferri, an abstract expressionist artist living in Milan. An artist whose success is both a source of guilt (he's the one who sets the exorbitant prices charged for his paintings), and resentment (he runs himself ragged filling arbitrary gallery quotas that only feed his belief that success has turned his art into merchandise--just another collectible consumer commodity). Stricken with an acute case of creative stasis and trapped within a kind of existential inertia, he fears that his methods of creation--a spontaneous, gestural, “action painting” technique---are becoming obsolete in the high-volume Pop Art world of mixed media and mechanical reproduction.
A modern artist pitted against modernism, everything about his work has grown too “too” for the contemporary marketplace: his prices too high, his methods too slow, his canvases too large, and his art too impenetrable.

Normative Dualism
The mental and physical in the creative process

With his two-month creative dry spell threatening to turn into three, stress and isolation take an ever-increasing toll on Leonardo's mind and psyche. Most provocatively, in serving to escalate his already conflicted feelings for Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave), his married lover who also just happens to be his agent.

The cool pragmatist to Leonardo’s exposed-nerve fantasist, Flavia—who has him on an allowance, keeps tabs on his work output, and is forever scribbling down figures in ledgers—loves him, but is shrewdly accepting of his paranoid distrust and need to cast her as the villain in their relationship. Flavia: (catching sight of him eyeing a weighty object d’art in his apartment): "Darling, Leonardo…you can’t kill me with that, it’s just a big paper clip.”

The ambiguity of perception figures significantly in how A Quiet Place in the Country builds suspense and consistently keeps the viewer on unsteady ground. Early in the film, Leonardo is depicted as the bound, passive, sex-object exploited both physically and creatively by the materialistic Flavia. The ready assumption is that we're seeing Leonardo's perception of the dynamics of their relationship. Later in the film, this scene is mirrored in a way that casts it in an entirely different light.

Owing at least part of his artist’s block to the challenge of trying to create meaningful work in the face of society’s capitalism-fed, art-as-consumer-goods ethos (he’s seen reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), Leonardo seizes upon the reasoned notion that the only way to get his inspiration mojo working again is to move away from the distractions of the city to a place of isolation and quiet where he can be at one with his thoughts.

Fate seems to oblige all too readily by placing in his path a remote, deteriorating villa that fairly beckons to him from the road. Although its condition is rundown and locals whisper about it being haunted by the ghost of a beautiful Countess who died there 40 years ago; the villa is nevertheless a secluded, bucolic spot offering Leonardo everything he’s looking for. And quite a bit of what he'll forever wish he'd never found.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

A Quiet Place in the Country is a sociopolitical, psychosexual haunted house movie that always feels a hairsbreadth away from submerging itself in its own late- ‘60s stylization. A thinking-person’s Giallo that incorporates all the familiar tropes of the genre (murder mystery, amateur sleuthing, graphic violence, eroticism, red herrings, etc.), its chief deviation from tradition—and key determiner as to whether or not this film will be your cup of tea—is its commitment to preserving the twitchy schizophrenic perspective of its abstract artist protagonist. Something achieved by presenting its rather straightforward story in as arty, willfully cryptic a manner as it can get away with without having to identify itself as avant-garde experimental cinema. It’s not that A Quiet Place in the Country doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, it’s just they’re arranged in a different order. 

Fragmented Fantasy
A Quiet Place in the Country is a reworking of Oliver Onions' 1911 masterwork of supernatural fiction The Beckoning Fair One.  The story of a man consumed by his obsession with a seductive, potentially malevolent ghost.

But for me, the style IS the story of A Quiet Place in the Country, a modern gothic tasking the viewer with determining whether a chain of increasingly bizarre events befalling a brooding hero is rooted in the psychological or the paranormal. As obscure and enigmatic as Petri’s images may be (pretentious...sure, heavy-handed...yes, fascinating...always), they credibly convey Leonardo's mental disintegration and heighten identification with the character. Petri's intimate style also poignantly underscore themes in the film interpreting the creative impulse--the need to express oneself and be understood by others--as an outer-directed primal compulsion compensating for the inner-inaccessibility of the unknowable self.

Visual Artist
Estranged from his feelings, Leonardo tries to invoke anything resembling a human response from himself as he flips through slide images of eroticism and violence. Leonardo's unreliable perceptions are dramatized in the film's motif of windows (often barred), kaleidoscopes (distortions), mirrors (fractured and two-sided), peepholes (limited), and camera lenses (at a remove).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Given my fondness for the hyper-stylized charms of Gialli, it surprises me to think just how late to the party I was in getting around to seeing my first Italian Giallo film as recently as 2016. The film was Lucio Fulci’s extraordinary Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and it so knocked my socks off that I went from 100% unfamiliarity with the genre to having since added some 40 Giallo titles to my film library.

I’m not sure that I’ve yet reconciled myself to the violence (making me thankful for that fake-looking, poster-paint-red blood they used back in the day), but I never cease to be impressed by how accommodating the genre is to such a broad scope of narrative concepts. There’s room for everything from gumshoes to ghosts under the Gaillo banner.

Idée Fixe 

 Flavia, the realist, and ever the consumer, is preoccupied with wealth. Leonardo, a resuscitated sensualist since moving to the country, is fetishistically bewitched by a yonic scrap of clothing once worn by the woman he thinks is haunting the villa.

As an example of the “arthouse horror” style of Giallo, A Quiet Place in the Country is low on sensationalism, surpassingly high on atmospheric mystery, and takes a cue from its title by trading the gaudy colorfulness I usually associate with the genre, for a kind of baroque naturalism. The very effective result is that supernatural terrors take place in the brightness of day, and hallucinations and spectral visions are made all the more disturbing by being indistinguishable from reality.

Terrified at the prospect of spending the night alone after witnessing a particularly hair-raising
display of ghostly pyrotechnics, Leonardo imposes himself upon his maid and her "brother." 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It’s been my experience that it’s very rare for a really intriguing horror film or mystery to have a payoff that lives up to its setup. The more disturbing the journey, the greater the chance the Big Reveal will prove anticlimactic. Against all odds, A Quiet Place in the Country ranks as one of those rarities. For me, it was an effectively compelling chiller with a doozy of a surprise ending worthy and fitting of all the with-it weirdness that came before it. 

By large measure, credit is owed to Oliver Onions’ impeccably-structured source novel; longtime Gialli cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller (Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Andy Warhol’s two 3-D horror titles, Dracula / Frankenstein); and a rattle-your-bones improvisational music score by Ennio Morricone and Nuova Consonanza.

Autoerotic
Leonardo Becomes His Own Sex Object

But as a huge fan of the exquisitely elephantine Camelot (1967) I'd be lying if I said that any part of this remarkable film impressed me more than the reteaming of Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero... MY Lady Guenevere and Sir Lancelot (the 2nd of some five films they would come to make together). Playing emotionally enigmatic lovers, both actors inhabit their roles with charismatic ease (Nero's the best I've ever seen him), their real-life sensual chemistry breathing life into the film's hyperventilating eroticism.

What Do The Simple Folk Do?
Though Redgrave appears nude in several scenes, fans of Nero have to content themselves with discreet angles and loincloths. As we now know, he was saving full-frontal for when he turned 75 (The Time of Their Lives - 2017)

A Quiet Place in the Country is genre-faithful as a murder mystery, a Giallo thriller, and a supernatural horror film, but its presentation is perhaps too iconoclast and its appeal too niche for me to recommend it wholeheartedly. Personally, I was absolutely enthralled by the film from the first frame to the last, finding much in what Elio Petri had to say about art and alienation still relevant and echoed in contemporary films like Nocturnal Animals (2016) and Velvet Buzzsaw (2019).

There's a thin membrane separating impulse, instinct, and inspiration. A Quiet Place in the Country suggests the wall distinguishing between passion, obsession, and compulsion is perhaps nonexistent.

BONUS MATERIAL:

A reader (thanks!) brought it to my attention that the source material for A Quiet Place in the Country, Oliver Onions' novella The Fair Beckoning One, was also made into a (stultifyingly pedestrian) episode of the Hammer anthology TV series Journey to the Unknown. Starring Robert Lansing and Gabrielle Drake, the episode was broadcast in December of 1968. Although A Quiet Place in the Country was also made in 1968, it wasn't released in the US until 1970.

The TV version of The Fair Beckoning One

That Redgrave and Nero were considered quite the scandalous pair in their day, now seems rather quaint. The two met in 1966 while making Camelot, lived in sin (gasp!), and had a baby out of wedlock before separating in 1971.  Shocking stuff, that.
What makes their story the stuff of fairy tales is their reuniting after several decades apart, and getting married in 2006. A story made all the more romantic due to countless interviews given by the never-married Nero over the years claiming he would never marry and that Redgrave had been the love of his life. In 2017 the couple danced together on the Italian TV show Strictly Come Dancing (below).

1968                                                        2017

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020

TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN 1972

Toys Are Not For Children, an unashamedly debauched ‘70s grindhouse trash treasure with the subversive smarts of arthouse cinema, is a psychosexual fever dream about childhood trauma and arrested emotional development. In keeping with the film’s kiddie-centric theme, and being something of a case of pop-cultural stunted growth myself, I offer an introduction to the film in the style of my favorite childhood cartoon show--The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle--a program that ended each cliffhanger episode with two pun-heavy either/or wordplay titles. 

Toys Are Not For Children 

(In the voice of narrator William Conrad) Be sure to join us for our next episode: 
 "Welcome to the Psycho-Doll House” or “Mourning Becomes Electra-Complex.”

Marcia Forbes as Jamie Godard

Harlan Cary Poe as Charlie Belmond

Evelyn Kingsley as Pearl Valdi

Luis Arroyo as Eddie 

Fran Warren as Edna Godard

During New Hollywood’s clumsy transitional years, when recently-relaxed censorship laws made it easier for explicit images of sex and sadism to proliferate on movie screens, low-budget exploitation films were faced with the dilemma of seeing the once-exclusive staples of their domain—prurience, sensationalism, nudity, violence, profanity, and sordid content—co-opted by the major studios. With 20^th Century-Fox greenlighting megabuck miscalculations like Myra Breckinridge (1970)  and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). And Warner Bros. bankrolling the X-rated, controversy-courting masterworks A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Devils (1971), how was a lowly, lowbrow independent expected to compete?

For many in the quick-play, easy-profit trade, the obvious solution was to raise the stakes by lowering the bar. To explore themes and topics even the majors might be squeamish about touching, and in so doing (perhaps inadvertently, but always inevitably), usher in the crazy.

Enter filmmaker Stanley H. Brassloff, creator of two of 1968’s more obscure “roughies” (a gritty subgenre of sexploitation, usually featuring sexual violence) Two Girls for a Madman and Behind Locked Doors, and the director/producer/screenwriter (with Macs McAree) of the disarmingly whacko Toys Are Not For Children. 

As if suddenly realizing it has an awful lot of perversion to shoehorn into a rather breakneck 85-minute running time, Toys Are Not For Children gets swiftly down to business in a doozy of a pre-credits sequence that perfectly sets the tone for all the bizarro that follows. To the accompaniment of ominous chords of organ music and considerable heavy breathing on the soundtrack, an astonished mother walks in on her teenage daughter writhing naked on a child-sized bed in an infantile, toy-cluttered bedroom, lost in a fog of rapturous masturbation while caressing a stuffed toy soldier and moaning “Daddy…Daddy!”

And…we’re off to the dysfunction races.

Barbie's No-Fun House

Furniture scale and decor emphasize the doll-like world Jamie inhabits

“How long has this been going on? The stuff you’re doing… you’re just like your father! Well, he’s too busy with his women. All he ever did was send you these stinking toys and you take them to bed. It’s unnatural. Do you hear me? Unnatural!”

The individual illustrating that any toy can be a sex toy when you’re toting around emotional baggage the size of a steamer trunk is 19-year-old Jamie Godard of Long Island, NY. An emotionally immature young woman who, if you'll allow for the gross understatement, really misses her absentee father.

It seems beloved daddy Phillip Godard was abruptly and unceremoniously kicked out of the house, never to be seen again, when Jamie was but six years old. Left in the toxic care of Edna, her embittered, sexually repressed mother, Jamie's method of coping was to cultivate a dissociatively idealized image of her father. A soft-focus, turbidly carnal image dramatically at odds with her mother's frequent, epithet-laden reminders to Jamie that her father is a whoremonger, a drunkard, and, like all men, an evil scumbag who wants only one thing from women. Well, two things, actually. Edna emphatically maintains that men only want housewives and whores...just so long as they're not the same woman.

Playing Around
Jamie finds her dream job working in (what else?) a toy store. There she meets and, as a means of escaping her mother, hastily marries a co-worker, Charlie Belmond. In this scene, Charlie expresses his love for the decidedly impassive Jamie under the watchful gaze of several toys. Most prophetically: a Betty Big Girl doll and one called Little Honeymoon (the space baby from Dick Tracy comics).

Left to cope with the psychological fallout of being raised by two monumentally ill-matched individuals with the relationship skills of an Edward Albee Second Act, Jamie hasn’t grown up so much as grown inward. Inhibited, sexually fearful, and emotionally shut off on any subject that isn’t related to either toys or her dad; Jamie lives in a cocooned world of developmental suspended animation. One that feeds the delusion that her Daddy isn't just the only man ever to love her, he's the only man who will EVER love her.
Like The Wizard of Oz, The Bluebird, and countless bedtime stories about little girls embarking on journeys in search of something elusive and prized, Toys Are Not For Children is a fucked-up Fractured Fairy Tale chronicling Jamie's perverted Pilgrim's Progress to contrive the world's most misguided father and daughter reunion.

Something Olde, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
The blue, in this case, being Charlie's balls, as Jamie prefers honeymoon cuddling with her stuffed toy

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

One of the nice surprises about exploitation flicks is that while they remain refreshingly honest and upfront about their commitment to giving audiences only the most salacious, exaggerated take on a subject at any given time, behind the surface, a great many of them turn out to be remarkably subversive. 

The kind of movie Toys Are Not For Children sold itself as can be gleaned from the two act-of-desperation alternative titles it was rereleased under after initially bombing at the boxoffice. There’s the grossly misleading How to Make Love to a Virgin and the simply nonsensical Virgin Dolls. But Toys Are Not For Children is actually an outlandish incest taboo/titillation tease propping up a provocatively rendered commentary on the limited and contradictory nature of society’s assigned roles for women. 

Jamie finds a friend, surrogate mother, & role model in Pearl Valdi, a New York prostitute and single mother (looking very Jacqueline Susann in her Pucci dress and mountain of hair) who visits the store one day to buy a birthday gift for her 9-year-old daughter. Jamie suggests a toy oven:

Jamie: “She can cook for her friends!”

Pearl: “Heh, she’ll be doing that for the rest of her life!”

Jamie: “Oh, when you’re 9 it's fun to play house!”

Pearl: “As long as you only PLAY house...it’s OK.”

With its three female major characters, at times, Toys Are Not For Children feels like Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) filtered through the twisted mind of John Waters. Jamie, Pearl, and Edna each represent a restrictive feminine archetype. Jamie is woman as the eternal child. The infantilized daddy’s girl expected to be the virginal, compliant, and dependent love-receptacle whose sexualized innocence she’s neither allowed to acknowledge nor own. Who gets to define what it means to be a "good" girl or independent woman? Too often it's tied to archaic, patriarchal notions of purity and the silencing of a woman's voice in deciding who has access to her body.  

Pretty In Pink
Even in the midst of the Women's Movement, the '70s trafficked heavily
in the fetishization of sexualized youth and the infantilizing of women 

If Jamie is a worst-case casualty of our culture’s mania for girls who mature sexually but never grow up, then Jamie’s mother Edna is the Donna Reed / Leave It To Beaver domestic fantasy yanked to the dark side. Literally a housewife in that she’s never seen outside the confines of her claustrophobic home (the film’s dollhouse motif, again), Jamie’s vindictive mother—like the proverbial madwoman in the attic—is characterized as crazy and irrational, but, as we learn, she’s the only one who sees what’s actually going on. 

Between the sleaze and shocking revelations, Toys Are Not For Children manages to squeeze in a surprising number of barbed observations about the narrow scope through which women are viewed by society. Through the subtly competitive relationships Jamie has with her mother (vying for the attention of her father), and Pearl (capitulating to Eddie, Pearl's pimp and bedmate), it's dramatized how women, for want of male-gaze validation (aka love), often adopt inauthentic, ill-fitting personas and fail to be mutually supportive allies to other women...even in instances of shared trauma. 

In its depiction of Jamie's traumatizing home life, the film points to the cultural contrasts in the ways marriage is framed for women (all Happy Homemaker fulfillment, no drudgery) and men (standard Playboy Joke Page stuff about loss of freedom and a lifetime saddled to the ol' ball-and-chain). 

I Don't Wanna Grow Up, I'm A Toys R Us Kid
Ironically, the first time Charlie meets Jamie, he's the one acting like a child. Driving a toy car through the aisles, upon catching sight of his future wife, the camera frames him so he's surrounded by gendered toys of domesticity: a toy over, vacuum cleaner, blender, dishwasher set, and hairdryer

Rounding out this triad of female archetypes is whore: the umbrella label assigned to any woman who falls outside the Purity Myth. As it happens, Pearl (who instantly won me over in her introduction scene by giving serious Jacqueline Susann energy with her big hair and Pucci dress) actually IS a whore, but a capitalistically unapologetic one with a maternalistic streak. Caring to Edna’s cold, colorful to Edna’s drab, and lively to Edna's cynical dispiritedness, Pearl becomes an unexpected, unwilling role model for Jamie. 

I'm Coming Out
Jamie gets herself a Klute haircut, a new wardrobe, and a new career.  

As with Altman's film, the three women in Toys Are Not For Children exemplify three distinct aspects of female identity. That these are simply the standard-issue complexities and contradictions that come with being a dimensional adult can serve as commentary on how society favors the assuming of a single role in life. Playacting, if you will. 

"That Jamie is a real doll!"
Charlie fails to conceal his annoyance at his boss Max (N.J. Osrag)
for insisting that married life must be pure bliss

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I can’t say exactly what expectations I brought to Toys Are Not For Children, I only know they were low. Making the mistake of assuming the film’s obscurity was indicative of its quality, I settled in hoping for nothing more than a newly unearthed, so-bad-it’s-good godsend. Is it low-budget? To be sure. Feature uneven acting? Without a doubt. Inadvertently humorous at times? Most certainly. But, much like when I saw the movie Dinah East (1970)--that other little-known exploitationer I discovered decades after its initial release--I came away from Toys Are Not For Children simply floored to discover a sharp, disarmingly perceptive, almost recklessly unorthodox film. 

Sex-phobic Jamie has a particularly bad reaction
to happening upon an amorous couple in the woods

Though not all of the film's provocative ideas are thought through, and its take on sexual psychosis is dodgy at best. But I can't help being impressed by the way the story--told in disjointed, time-hopping flashbacks--has the viewer effectively share Jamie’s fractured worldview and memory. Out of this grows a narrative tension that feels like the piecing together of a bizarre puzzle. 

The look of the film is colorful and toy-box-bright, giving forth with an eye-orgy of kooky '70s decor, fashions, and hairstyles. The performances run the gamut of being a step above Andy Warhol level to the unexpectedly affecting and natural performance by Evelyn Kingsley as Pearl. 

Depending on how you look at it, Jamie's development or degradation is given visual emphasis in these mirror shots that have the artwork in Jamie's room reflect her sexual "maturity." Top right: a tiny picture of a little girl hangs in a room cluttered with toys. Below: a large painting of a nude woman staring unashamedly at the artist (viewer).

As the 1970s progressed, exploitation films grew so increasingly standardized and mainstream, that genuinely offbeat, difficult-to-categorize releases like this all but disappeared. A fact that makes me regret that I missed out on the opportunity to see Toys Are Not For Children when it first came out. Certainly, amid the glut of male-centric action films and buddy movies I saw at the time, a female-driven exercise in eccentricity like this would have been most welcome. 

Of course, there are compensations. For one, I'm certain the Blu-ray copy available today looks better than the original print ever did. A lot of my favorite mainstream films have yet to see a DVD or Blu-ray release so it's something of a thrill that SOMEONE thought to exhume this forgotten gem and give us connoisseurs of "cinéma de l'étrange" an experience not easy to forget.

Twisted Toy Story

BONUS MATERIAL

I was surprised to discover the actress playing Jamie's perpetually
pissed-off mother was a former big band singer and jazz vocalist
who, in 1947, introduced the popular standard "A Sunday Kind of Love." 

Films Dealing With Themes Similar to Toys Are Not For Children

Toys in the Attic (1963): Family dysfunction, incest, and Yvette Mimieux as a childlike woman.

Secret Ceremony (1968): Family dysfunction, sexual abuse, Elizabeth Taylor as a maternal whore, and Mia Farrow as a childlike woman.

Secret Ceremony

Toys Are Not For Children

Several times in the film I found my eyes drawn to the distinctive art print Pearl has on the wall of her apartment. I discovered it's a poster for a 1967 exhibit at New York's Pace Gallery for surrealist Ernest Trova. The image is from his Falling Man series. Pearl had more class than I thought!

It's Time To Speak of Unspoken Things

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2020

CONSUMPTION AS IDENTITY: Movies, Fandom, & Critical Thinking

“Criticism is the only thing that stands between the audience and advertising.” 

Pauline Kael 

I love watching movies. A claim that until recently also meant I love going to the movies. But as I've grown older, I’m afraid the whole communal experience thing has begun to lose some of its appeal for me. Which is really too bad, timing-wise, since moviegoing has never been more user-friendly and tailored for customer satisfaction. Take, for example, those new-fangled, high-backed, individual armrest w/cupholder, semi-reclining stadium seats designed to accommodate the plush expanses of the American Big Gulp/Super-Size derrière.
Or the more-democratic return of reserved seating, which, in my day, was exclusively a roadshow luxury afforded the elite (i.e., folks with social calendars and reliable babysitters). Concession stands, once just a place to buy popcorn, over-carbonated beverages, and DOTS™ candies to strew in the aisles for other patrons to step on; now offer a veritable food truck variety menu. And in many theaters, a real, live person comes out just before the film starts to remind patrons to turn off their phones--just like in the days of the silents when title cards reminded ladies to please remove their hats.

But over the years I’ve accepted the fact (my partner would say "embraced" is more like it) that I’ve become far too crabby and curmudgeonly for these tantalizing innovations in movie exhibition to exert much influence over my resistance to seeing films with an audience. In whatever graveyard one might find buried the ornate movie palaces of old...those with uniformed ushers and $1 souvenir programs; sneak previews that were actually a surprise; or double-features and open admission policies...there is where you’re likely to find what once made seeing movies in theaters so much fun for me: a youthful disinterest in monitoring the behavior of others.

On the other hand, what hasn’t changed a bit over the years is how much I love to talk about movies. When I was young, Saturdays meant my three sisters and I would spend entire afternoons at the local movie theater immersing ourselves in colorful worlds and lives far different from our own. Our method of prolonging the experience and making the movies last until the following Saturday—when, more than likely, we'd see the same exact double-bill again—would be to engage one another in conversation about the movies we’d just seen. In exhaustive, expansive detail.

The necessity of having to sit together in silence for long stretches of time in a dark theater (we were far too strictly brought up to be the kind of kids who talked during a movie), meant that once the screening was over, we'd be fairly bursting with all we'd been storing up to talk about. Thus, no afternoon at the movies ever felt complete without the accompanying animated conversations we'd have on the bus ride home. We’d talk about the plot, which performances we liked, recount favorite scenes, recite passages of dialogue, and share with one another our varied, seldom intersecting, opinions on what we thought of the movie overall.
Due to there being so many of us, each having our own unique take on the same movie, I came to understand then what has remained true for me ever since: when someone shares their thoughts about a movie...their personal response to it, their critiques, their likes and dislikes...movies are so subjective, what is being relayed always reveals more about the individual speaking than it does about the film itself.

Unless talking about a film's aspect ratio or running time, little about movie discourse is ever objective. Claims of a film being either "good" or "bad"--even when those claims are from esteemed sources---are not statements of fact. Talking movies is an exercise in subjective observation, personal tastes, and individual aesthetics. But listening to an individual share their thoughts on a film not only affords an opportunity to learn something about the particular person; it also allows for the chance to experience a film from a fresh perspective. An experience that can call our attention to things we might not otherwise have noticed.

"It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good."   - Tina Fey 

Going to the Movies: Communal Act / Private Experience

My sisters and I were pretty good about not letting our differences of opinion get in the way, but that's not to say all was smooth sailing. Anyone with siblings will tell you that disagreeing on things—make that, everything—is a fact of life. The only reason our weekend post-movie confabs didn't habitually end in reenactments of that ladies' room scene in Valley of the Dolls is through the honing of certain skills. Each of us had to learn the fundamentals of tact, debate, listening, and not being judgmental when it came to other people's tastes. And let's not forget the all-important, knowing when to keep one’s yap shut.

Take, for instance, the time I managed to look both supportive and straight-faced while my eldest sister, after taking us to see The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (1964) for what must have been the 6^th consecutive time, explained at length why George Harrison (his being “the quiet one” and all), never got as much attention as the others, and was, therefore, the only member of the Fab Four deserving of her lifelong devotion. 

Curious George: George Harrison in A Hard Day's Night (1964)

And if a similar familial diplomacy was responsible for the peaceable resolution to a starchy standoff between me and another sister over the relative merits of Debbie Reynolds’ eager-to-please performance in 1964s The Unsinkable Molly Brown (she was pro, I was con); I credit my preteen Spidey-senses for knowing I'd be saving myself a lot of grief by waxing enthusiastically about the beauty and talent of up-and-comer Faye Dunaway in The Happening (1967) rather than gushing the sentiment I really wanted to express: that for the entire film I couldn't take my eyes off of co-star George Maharis.

Gorgeous George: George Maharis in The Happening (1967)

Our tradition of after-movie chat sessions continued well into our teens. Rather a remarkable feat, given the closeness of our ages and the way puberty plays the dirty hormonal trick of ratcheting up adolescent hypersensitivity at the very same time it kicks teenage know-it-all-ism (typified by the frequent, unchecked volunteering of inflexible opinions) into overdrive.
But as our individual personalities began to emerge and our tastes grew more disparate and self-defining, the biggest change I noticed was that while my sisters continued to enjoy movies in much the same way they always had; I'd graduated on to something that fell geekily between enthusiastic interest and all-consuming passion. Gradually, as I began to self-identify more and more as a movie buff and film enthusiast, my contributions to our post-movie discussions took on a decided air...much of it hot.

Alas, I was almost always "that guy" in the movie line.

The Funicello Fracas

To give you an idea of the kind of hurdles that had to be surmounted before my sisters and I were ultimately able to hammer out an honest, mutually respectful way of sharing our differing tastes in movies and pop culture, I offer up this case history: When I was but a wee lad, I harbored a latent crush on Annette Funicello in reruns of The Mickey Mouse Club on TV.
I was equally closeted in my infatuation with Frank Converse on Coronet Blue and Richard Chamberlain on Dr. Kildaire at the time, but I guess my sisters picked up on something they saw in my eyes each time Annette adorably dropped her chin and spelled out "...K-E-Y" during the Mouseketeer sign-off. Whatever it is they saw, it launched them on a merciless campaign of teasing me about it that lasted for several days. The more they teased, the louder and more fervent came my false denials, until one day I broke down in tears and barricaded myself in my room.

The Mouse-Eared Troublemaker

Teasing wasn't anything new between us, but any of us being responsible for making the other cry was a definite no-no. So my sisters' way of apologizing and remedying the situation was to take crayon to construction paper and hastily fashion signs emblazoned with slogans declaring “Kenny Doesn’t Like Annette!” and “Kenny says NO to Annette!" and then march back and forth in front of my bedroom door as though participating in the world's smallest, least consequential protest demonstration.

In what would be her final film for AIP, the studio behind all those Beach Party movies, Annette Funicello co-starred with pop star Fabian in Thunder Alley (1967). A racing car drama in which the former Mouseketeer fends off a date rapist and gets to play her first drunk scene

I’d like to say this was the last time my sisters ever teased me, but that would be a lie. But it WAS the first and last time any of us ever teased the other with the intention of making them feel small because of their personal tastes.
In fact, some years later, it occasioned we all went to a double-feature, the bottom half of which was a low-budget race car drama titled Thunder Alley (1967), starring a considerably more mature Annette. And although it was clear that I was the only one enjoying it (being that my secret love was no secret anymore), when I sheepishly asked if we could PLEASE stay to see it a second time, my siblings readily consented, with nary a smirk, jibe, or rolled eye between them. I like to think I paid back my debt of gratitude when, not long after during their Clint Eastwood phase, I managed to stay awake, non-protesting through two screenings of Paint Your Wagon.

As we grew older and Saturdays changed to going to the movies with friends instead of family (in my case, friends for whom "That was good!" or "What a piece of shit!"  represented all that needed to be said about any given movie), I took to filling the film critique void with trips to the library. The late '60s and '70s were the absolute heyday of film journalism, so it was there where I'd lose myself in books and magazines devoted to cinema essays and film analyses by my favorites: Pauline Kael, Peter Bogdanovich, Stanley Kauffmann, Andrew Sarris, and John Simon. That I didn't always agree with their opinions was never the point. It was my love of movies that kept me at the table. 

Most eye-opening for me was how these writers balanced respect for the emotional persuasiveness of film while still applying critical thinking to what they deemed to be a movie's flaws and merits. The objective was not to tear movies down or spoil anyone's fun, merely a belief that films had both the potential and responsibility to be better: better entertainment, better art. These writers taught me how to look at film and evaluate cinema in ways that extended beyond the purely sensate. Suddenly, how a movie made me think came to be as important to me as how a movie made me feel.

"The unexamined film is not worth seeing."  - A film buff's take on the Socrates quote

After years of being regarded as a purely escapist entertainment medium,
the serious and thoughtful critical evaluation of film seemed to be everywhere.

If those years spent watching movies on weekends and reading about movies during the weekdays represent the Appreciation & Evaluation stage of my love affair with film, then high school brought me to my Identification & Proprietary phase. As a Black, gay adolescent forging an identity for myself while attending an all-boys Catholic school while living in a predominantly white neighborhood; movies provided me with escape, motivation, and emotional catharsis. Relating on deeply personal levels to the movies I consumed, I found in the films of (significantly, but not exclusively) Robert Altman, Ken Russell, and Roman Polanski…inspiration and a dream of—if not entirely the person I was at the time—then most certainly the person I wanted to become.

Being neither a jock nor a joiner, I was largely invisible during my freshman year, but due to always having my nose buried in a book about movies, by sophomore year I was known around campus as The Movie Guy. A label that stuck and an image I enthusiastically cultivated for the entirety of my years at St. Mary's.

This pseudo-notoriety led to my participation in such geeky extracurricular pursuits as writing movie reviews for the school paper and posting fan-art movie posters in the library. It also led to my getting to meet the other movie buffs (a.k.a., the other gay kids) at school. And while it was great to find individuals with whom I could again talk movies...this time with guys who (to say the least) shared a similar enthusiasm; I gotta also say that I was less than thrilled that it also occasioned my first face-to-face encounter with blinkered fandom and the vociferously proprietary side of celebrity worship.

The fundamentally solitary, insular nature of being a film fan (It's not a team sport. It's essentially a person's internal relationship with the flickering images on a screen) doesn't easily lend itself to open-forum discourse under the best of circumstances. Much less socially-awkward adolescents in the first hormonal flushes of pop-culture infatuation and film-based cultural identity attachment.

Since this was more than a decade before Siskel & Ebert at the Movies demonstrated that even erudite middle-aged men were not above resorting to ad hominem attacks when in disagreement, I blamed it on our youth when nearly every movie discussion our group had splintered off into white-knighting protectiveness (only sycophantic praise allowed, critique not tolerated); proprietary elitism (no one loves their favorite as much as they); and emotional defensiveness (subjective criticisms of a favorite film or celebrity was perceived as a personal attack). Where were my sisters with their picket signs when I needed them?

Them's Fightin' Words
A Gen-Z internet quarrel over Beyonce or Taylor Swift is child's play compared to the maelstrom of social media vitriol Baby Boomers are capable of unleashing when a favored classic film or screen personality falls under critical scrutiny.

Having wanted to be a filmmaker since the age of 11 when I saw Rosemary's Baby, after graduation, there was no question that I was going to film school. A move that marked the end of the informal phase of my cinema education and ushered in a period in my life that I now look back on and call the Status & Ego epoch.
In many ways, film school was everything I hoped it would be. Not the least of it being my “How long has this been going on?” reaction to the idea of earning academic credit for that which I’d been gleefully doing all those years for nothing. The transition from film-consumer to film-maker was fun and challenging, but...being the talker that I am...I got the biggest charge out of the Film Study classes.

Classes with names like Classic Film Theory & Aesthetics, where movies were thoughtfully and critically discussed without the assumption that scrutiny automatically signaled a fault-finding expedition, brought back memories of the fun I had talking movies with my sisters as a kid. For the first time in my life, in an atmosphere where I was free to eat, drink, sleep, and breathe movies to my heart’s content, I felt completely in my element. So much so that I scarcely noticed that I was surrounded by, and had myself, morphed into, this:

I don't mean to generalize (yes, I do), but when someone says something like this,
the least of what's intended to be conveyed is that they're going to the movies. 

There are worse things than being a film snob, but few are as boring to be around. I don't know how my relatives withstood it. Quicker and more painlessly than I'd like to admit, I'd allowed myself to become the '70s version of what I call the Criterion Collection hipster: the self-styled cineaste overheard at film festivals saying things like, “You mean you’ve never seen ‘The Bicycle Thief’…not even once?”
Hungry for the instant (meaningless) status and ego lift and kinship of belonging to a community of film lovers, I deluded myself into believing that seeing movies in arthouses was superior to a cineplex, and that watching films with subtitles and dropping the names of foreign film directors gave me some kind of cultural cachet.

"The fact that the [Marvel Universe] films themselves don't interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament."   - Martin Scorsese 

A simple cinephile fact, yet it bears constant repeating: 

Not everyone has to feel the same way about a movie. 

Maybe film schools should offer a course teaching film scholars that no matter how esteemed, awarded, profitable, critically acclaimed, or beloved a film, franchise, or cult favorite is; it's perfectly OK and absolutely natural for someone else to dislike it. Those individuals are not wrong, they're not jealous, they aren't haters, they're not stupid, and they didn't misunderstand it... they simply feel differently about it than you do. 

Movies had always had such an expansive effect on my life, yet once I embarked on a course of formal cinema study—taking both film and myself far too seriously—my world only narrowed.

But, in the words of Stephen Sondheim, "Everybody has to go through stages like that." It took the distancing of time and an intervention from a highly unlikely source (see: Xanadu post) before I was able to find my way back to that kid who fell in love with movies on Saturday afternoons because of the dreams they inspired, not the identity-association and ego-status I sought to acquire via its consumption (i.e., you are what you watch).

And I’m afraid I’ve never lost my passion for talking about movies, and happily, for the last 24 years or so I’ve been able to indulge my mania for post-screening armchair movie quarterbacking with my partner. A fellow of unyielding good taste (he’ll appreciate my adding) who shares the belief that fandom, comfort movies, and franchise loyalty are all an important part of what makes movies so much fun, but upholds the principle that film has always been at its best when it is also inspiring new thoughts and ideas, not merely confirming the ones we already hold.

Show Me The Magic

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015