Sex in Cinema 1980
November, 1980
Looking Back at the films of 1980, one might guess that movie audiences were heavily peppered with pederasts and pedophiles: If a film didn't feature gays, it revealed some budding Lolita. To be sure, homosexuals have been fairly bounding out of their closets lately, but still it's a bit surprising to realize how completely they have been assimilated into the cinema--either as central characters (Nijinsky) or as subsidiaries (Paul McCrane's sympathetically drawn gay student in Fame, Alan Rosenberg's sexually uncertain Harvard undergrad in Happy Birthday, Gemini). Not coincidentally, last year's rollicking La Cage aux Folles, which based most of its fun on the plight of two aging homosexuals attempting to appear straight, has become one of the most successful foreign films ever released in this country.
At the same time, 1980 has produced a bumper crop of child stars--and not of the Shirley Temple variety. Tatum O'Neal, Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields have been joined by such nymphets as Linda Manz, Diane Lane, Kristy McNichol, Mariel Hemingway, et al.; in roles not scripted by Louisa May Alcott. Little Darlings, for example, finds O'Neal and McNichol in hot competition at summer camp to see who can be first to lose her virginity. In Circle of Two, made in Canada, Tatum sets her pubescent cap for world-weary painter Richard Burton, posing for him in the nude and tempting the poor man to distraction (though when the girl pursues him to New York, Burton finally gets cold feet and calls the whole thing off). Foxes surveys the coming of age of a quartet of (text continued on page 192) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 172) nubile teenagers headed by Jodie Foster, the only one of them with the will and intelligence to stay out of trouble-- something that she fails to do in her subsequent film, Carny, where she enters into a steamy ménage à trois (complete with seminude love scenes) with co-star Gary Busey and his carnival partner, Robbie Robertson. For sharp-faced, pint-sized Linda Manz (of last year's The Wanderers), there's the sudden recollection of having been molested by her father (Dennis Hopper) when he drunkenly offers her to a pal in Out of the Blue (which Hopper also directed). She retaliates by killing her father, then blowing up her mother and herself; could one call that incesticide?
But the most notable (or notorious) of the year's teenaged revelations was Randal Kleiser's The Blue Lagoon, which made it abundantly clear that sultry-faced Brooke Shields was, indeed, growing up. Although the studio (Columbia) insists that in shots showing the girl nude from the waist up, her long hair was carefully glued to her breasts, and that a stand-in was used for moments of full nudity (odd that after her Vogue layouts and Pretty Baby exposure, Shields should turn shy), the film nevertheless reveals that her childlike form is beginning to match her sensuous features. What immaturity remains is in her acting.
Blue Lagoon, based on a novel by Henry De Vere Stacpoole that was popular around the turn of the century, has to do with a couple of very young children who are shipwrecked on an island in the South Seas. Left alone, they gradually learn to fend for themselves--building shelters, growing food, fishing and doing lots of swimming. But as they grow older (i.e., as the young performers of the early reels become Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins), they feel the first stirrings of their sexuality. Shields surprises Atkins masturbating behind a rock, panics at the sight of blood from her first, menstrual period and becomes alternately coy and petulant with the bewildered boy. But then his maleness begins to assert itself and their childlike play turns serious as he talks about "doing it" with her. (Just why the scriptwriter, Douglas Day Stewart, felt the need for such an anachronistic euphemism remains unclear.) But they do "do it," with obvious relish, then look on in wonder as the girl's body changes and swells and leads them to the mystery of childbirth.
Although the picture had been made once before, in 1949 (with a radiant Jean Simmons in the Shields role), the conventions of that era prevented its being done in what director Kleiser chooses to describe as "the modern way, where you can see the exploration of human relationships freely." Too freely for some. The Los Angeles County Commission on Obscenity and Pornography is said to be in the process of re-examining existing obscenity statutes, looking for ways to ban the production of films, at least in Hollywood, exploiting teenage nudity, Kleiser, himself only 34, views The Blue Lagoon not only as tasteful but of positive educational value for teenagers experiencing the same stirrings as his protagonists--a point he has made to youth groups throughout the country in expressing his displeasure with the M.P.A.A.'s R rating.
Ironically, every one of these coming-of-age films (to which might be added A Small Circle of Friends, an evocation of Harvard life in the late Sixties) that has received an M.P.A.A. classification has been R-rated, meaning that the very audiences to whom they would be most relevant may see them only when accompanied by a parent or an adult guardian. For whom, then, are these movies made? Are they intended as object lessons for parents with problem teenagers? Is the moral of Out of the Blue that incest may be harmful to your health? Is Little Darlings designed to alert parents to the sexual snares of summer camp? Certainly, it's impossible to ascertain whom Foxes writer-producer Gerald Ayres considers more culpable, the overly permissive parent or the one who is overly strict. The only thing that's ringingly clear in all of these pictures is that the kids are considerably more knowledgeable than the adults--which is not precisely the message that most parents or adult guardians want to hear. Or are these films merely a safe form of titillation for all those dirty old men who get their jollies from looking at seminaked teenagers and hearing them use foul language?
Nor is exploration--or exploitation-- of youthful sexuality confined to American releases. Perhaps the most prestigious import of the year, winner of the Oscar as Best Foreign Film, was Germany's The Tin Drum. Based on the well-known Gunter Grass novel, it's a parable of Germany between the wars, centering on a boy who wills himself never to grow beyond the age of three. But while he remains childlike physically, he matures emotionally--to the point of taking to bed the lubricious teenager his brutish father has made his concubine and drudge. (There is also an incredibly erotic sequence in which his mother, forced against her will to choke down a plateful of eels, begins cramming her maw insatiably with fish, fish and more fish, until she dies of the surfeit. Well, maybe you have to see it.)
From France comes Rascals (Les Turlupins), set during the German Occupation of World War Two, in a remote schoolhouse where postpubescent girls bare their all--to the consternation of the adolescent boys housed in the school across the way. Or consider the Dutch Spellers (which means sputtering fat but also connotes an ejaculation). Directed by Paul Verhoeven (of Turkish Delight and more recently, Soldier of Orange), it details the adventures of five teenagers whose main interests are sex and motorcycles, in that order. One of the girls will sleep with anyone to get ahead in the fish-and-chips business (hence the title); another gives up on promiscuity to become a Jesus freak; one of the boys commits suicide after becoming sexually incapacitated in a motorcycle crash; another who has been making a living by blackmailing homosexuals turns gay himself after being gang-raped.
One might wonder even more at the intended audience for homosexual films. Throughout the shooting of Cruising, based on a novel by Gerald Walker, the company was constantly harassed by New York's gays, who strenuously contended that the script, dealing with an undercover police investigation of a series of murders in the gay community, could only do them a disservice. (In Cruising, Al Pacino, the cop sent into this nether world to uncover a sadistic killer, gradually finds himself being sucked into the chains-and-leather lifestyle and ends up doubting his own sexuality.) Even before critics had had an opportunity to preview the movie, gays were out on picket lines protesting it, Clearly, this film, written and directed by William Friedkin, wasn't for them.
Not only did Cruising upset the gay community, it also stirred up no little controversy within the industry itself. Many theater owners, who had booked the film blind months before its release, refused to play it, claiming that despite (continued overleaf) its R rating, it was really X merchandise and far too strong for their houses. To make matters worse, it soon developed that the prints that went into distribution in mid-February still contained three scenes that, through mutual agreement by the producers and the M.P.A.A.'s Classification and Ratings Administration, were to have been either eliminated or toned down to qualify for the R. (One portrayed a particularly vicious and gory knifing; the two others were specifically sexual, involving the graphic depiction of both oral and anal sex acts.) For the summer drive-in trade, cuts were made and some of the sexual grapplings obliterated.
Jerry Weintraub, the producer of Cruising, at first maintained that he regarded the controversy as so much free publicity and a boon for business; but when, after an initial flurry from the curiosity seekers, the picture began to falter at the box office, he became notably less voluble.
Despite the classification squabble, the ratings system is still going strong. Its chairman, Jack Valenti, points out that in the 12 years of his board's existence, during which time more than 5500 pictures have been previewed, there has been only one incident similar to the Cruising case. "Two out of 5500," he said, "is a pretty good record."
If the gay world of Cruising is sordid, the world of Nijinsky is one of European elegance and refinement: Sergei Diaghilev's empire of the ballet, peopled by the most gifted dancers, composers and artists of the era. But despite its glamorous settings, there is an underlying harshness in this biographical account of the great impresario and his youthful protégé; the film makes it quite apparent that Nijinsky was just one in a procession of Diaghilev's lovers, all of them gifted young men to whom he gave fame in return for their favors. What gives this film its bitter aftertaste is the cynical ease with which the older man can dismiss his loves and the spite that creeps in when Nijinsky, more or less on the rebound, marries the aristocratic Hungarian ballerina Romola de Pulsky. Indeed, by his cold rejection of the young man, Diaghilev seems to have precipitated the madness that kept Nijinsky in an asylum for the next 33 years.
In effect, Nijinsky is the tragedy of a great artist, a man of rare taste and sensibilities, whose finer instincts are eroded by his passion. Ironically, that man isn't Nijinsky--it's Diaghilev, played subtly yet eloquently by Alan Bates. In the title role, dancer George De La Peña has surprisingly little to do except look beautiful (which he does) and perform in a sparse handful of excerpts from the Diaghilev repertoire. Outstanding is his interpretation of L'Après-Midi d'une Faune, climaxing in a passage of onstage auto-eroticism that presages Nijinsky's descent into madness.
What makes Nijinsky so important at this time is that it neither condones nor exploits homosexuality--it merely accepts it as a fact of life, or a way of life. In much the same manner, young Montgomery (Paul McCrane), one of the students at New York's High School of the Performing Arts, comes to terms with his homosexuality in Fame, a musical that, much like A Chorus Line, interweaves the life stories of its eight aspiring principals among the songs and dances. In a long, unbroken monolog, gazing straight at the camera, he describes his beautiful actress mother who's always on the road, the military academies he's been sent to, his shyness, his fear of girls. Since they open the film, his revelations make a profound impression, as do his later encounters with an equally shy girl (Maureen Teefy) and a raging Puerto Rican bully (Barry Miller). "Gay used to be such a happy word," he says at one point, feeling himself very much the outsider. But it's one of Fame's many virtues that by film's end, he's no longer an outsider; he's as much a part of the group as the Puerto Rican, the black, the nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn and the spoiled brat from West End Avenue. He's just one more color on the rich palette of life.
Unfortunately, not all film makers share this sensitivity; some may even be blind (perhaps willfully) to the true import of their own pictures. When both the National Gay Task Force and the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Film Makers, plus the Women Against Violence Against Women, protested the showing of Windows earlier this year, they claimed that it "sensationalizes the most pernicious ideas about lesbianism and rape." Barry Siegel's original screenplay calls for Elizabeth Ashley, in love with neighbor Talia Shire, to hire a cabdriver to rape the girl--and to tape-record her protestations while doing so. After which Ashley rents a loft from which she can observe, by telescope, the reactions of her thoroughly frightened prey. Producer Michael Lobell, when apprised of the dust storm his movie had kicked up, termed it "a hysterical reaction to a film that doesn't say one word about lesbianism. It's just the story of a crazy woman obsessed by another woman. At the end of the film, she tells her she loves her, but it was never intended in the sense these people are taking it." But, as they say in the law courts, ignorance is no excuse. It would be nice to report that all of these sincerely motivated protests helped scuttle the movie, but the truth is that Windows, like Cruising, sank through its own dramaturgical failings.
Lesbianism appears to be a far more difficult subject to treat adequately on the screen today than male homosexuality. No American movie to date has tackled it head on, but this past year has seen two worthy, if inadequate, attempts from Holland. A Woman Like Eve might be characterized as a kind of distaff Kramer vs. Kramer in which beautiful Monique van de Ven, after a protracted sojourn with Maria Schneider in a hippie commune in the south of France, returns home to claim possession from her husband of their two children. The court battle is prolonged; but even though the sentiments of Holland's only female director, Nouchka van Brakel, clearly favor the wife, the husband is never put down. The main trouble is that Schneider is so phlegmatic that you can't understand why Van de Ven would give up such a nice guy for her in the first place. There's a similar difficulty in Twice a Woman (Dutch made but with an English sound track). Bibi Andersson, a museum curator recently divorced from critic Tony Perkins, casually picks up a hairdresser's assistant (Sandra Dumas), takes her home and in no time they're in the sack together. Dumas, though playing a teenager, has the ripe beauty that Renoir used to paint; but conversationally, the character she plays is a drag, emotionally so unstable that she runs off to have a child by Perkins whom she can share with Andersson; it all ends in kitsch melodrama. Both films manage to suggest--probably unwittingly--that their lesbian liaisons were a mistake. Oddly enough, I can't think of a single movie that has taken the same attitude toward a heterosexual coupling. But, like the male gays, the lesbians are leaving their closets, and no doubt their concerns will soon be more positively reflected on the screen.
Of all the film forms, the most astonishing comeback of 1980 was staged by movie musicals--and the most astonishing of all was All That Jazz, which racked up a slew of Academy nominations (including Best Picture), then went on to share top honors at the prestigious Cannes festival. What makes this resurgence so surprising is the fact that the major companies had chosen to (continued on page 262) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 194) ignore musicals for almost a decade. With the exception of a few films like Cabaret and Hair, they've been a failure overseas (to which the studios look for at least 50 percent of their income). Musicals are devilishly expensive to make and dubbing has always been a further stumbling block to foreign distribution. People both here and abroad go to hear their favorite stars perform. Can you dub in an Italian voice for Streisand?
Perhaps the big reason musicals are back is that they're no longer totally tied to the big-name syndrome. They're not constructed around Astaire, Crosby or Garland; even Streisand hasn't done one since the disastrous A Star Is Born.
For whatever reason, musicals have returned, and in a profusion and variety underscoring the durability of this most American of all film forms, that extraordinary amalgam of sex, song and cinematics. Top honors, of course, have already gone to Bob Fosse for his semi-autobiographical All That Jazz--the first open-heart-surgery musical. Roy Scheider (Fosse's electric alter ego in the film) is a workaholic, revving himself up with pills, booze and cigarettes to maintain the killing pace he's set for himself: cutting a movie, rehearsing a Broadway musical and still finding the time to see his ex-wife and daughter, satisfy his mistress and bang most of the girls who come to his apartment in search of a stage career. It all leads up to a heart attack--but not before Fosse has staged a "come not with me" ballet that is as outrageous and erotic as anything that ever singed celluloid.
No less outrageous is the scene in which, lying on his deathbed, Scheider reviews his career--the bare-breasted burlesque chorines who made him come in his pants when he was just starting out, the mistress with a key to his apartment who blundered in while he was in bed with another date, the enigmatic Angelique (Jessica Lange), who appears as a symbol of death--a particularly sexy one. When Scheider finally succumbs (in the course of an elaborate production number, Bye Bye Life), there's no real reluctance on his part: He's got another beauty waiting for him on the other side. Fosse was criticized in some quarters for the egoism of his endeavor, but no one questioned for a moment his monumental inventiveness.
Similarly, some critics questioned both the sociological and the dramatic validity of several of Fame's numerous case histories (particularly the one involving street-wise Irene Cara and the shabby porno-film maker who lures her to his even shabbier digs), but no one denied director Alan Parker's ability to mold this material into a bold and original musical form, bursting with energy and talent. What makes Fame so fascinating as a musical is that, while spinning out the tangled lives of his young performers from their auditions through four years of high school, Parker lets the musical numbers flow out of their stories. Hot Lunch Jam, for example, is a wild, frenetic dance, but it begins with a student noodling some notes on a piano in the school cafeteria. Another picks up the rhythm, beating it out with spoons. Soon others are opening their instrument cases or dancing around the tables. And then they're all over the place, dancing on tables, the piano, the lunch counter, while the instrumentalists improvise without inhibition. When the proceedings finally grow too uninhibited, a shy girl grabs her books and an apple and edges out the door--and back into the story. Also notable is a number in which the kids pour out of the school in response to some amplified rock and are soon cavorting over the cars stalled along 46th Street, just off Times Square.
Obviously, with its cast and concerns (yes, and its R rating), Fame is yet another of the youth-oriented movies that have been crowding the screens this year--but that is true of every one of this year's musicals. It's as if the success of Saturday Night Fever and Hair had turned up a new demographic, one with a pronounced predilection for a disco beat. Producer Allan Carr had noted that earlier, when his film version of Grease soared through the roof of the nation's box offices. Can't Stop the Music, featuring the Village People, is his glity contribution to 1980's festivities. A film buff himself, Carr knowingly patterned his script along the lines of Metro's old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musicals--"Why don't we all put on a show?!" Only here, with a bow to the times, it's not a show but a demo record that Valerie Perrine wants to put together for Steve Guttenberg, the aspiring pop composer who shares her flat (Platonically). In a cleverly devised sequence, she enlists her performers literally off the streets, auditions them in her back yard and, voila--the Village People.
Unfortunately, the script becomes increasingly more plod than plot: It's not helped by double-entendres that never quite make it, nor by a cast (including ex-Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner) that's more at home in other fields. Even so, just as in the old Metro musicals, you're never that far from the next production number, and that's mainly what you go to a musical for, anyway. Never one to stint, Carr keeps coming up with showstop-pers that are lavish, stylish and fun, including a take-off on a milk commercial that's guaranteed to turn every director of TV commercials green. P.S.: Guttenberg gets his demo, Jenner gets Perrine and the Village People have one another.
At $20,000,000, Can't Stop the Music is clearly the Big Daddy of the year, but there are plenty of others in there trying. From Germany (though filmed in English and for an American company) comes a large, gaudy package called The Apple, heavy on the production side, light--as well as lightheaded--on plot. It's set in a futuristic world of 1994, which is dominated by evil Mr. Buggalow (Vladek Sheybal), who runs pop concerts. For some reason, he wants to add to his talent list Catherine Mary Stewart and George Gilmour, even though they sing only love ballads. The girl is swayed by his promises of fame and fortune; but the boy resists despite the enticements of Buggalow's hottest star, a beating from his goon squad and a mind-bending variety of drugs that he's forced to swallow. Some book! But it's all sandwiched in among an almost ceaseless procession of songs, dances and production numbers (some of them surprisingly suggestive, considering the Hansel and Gretel nature of their connecting tissue).
Then there's a trio of recent British imports featuring some of their most notable (or notorious) home-grown punk groups--Quadrophenia (The Who), Breaking Glass (with the group of the same name) and The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (the Sex Pistols minus Johnny Rotten), All offer considerably more than concerts, Glass exposing the cynicism of the record business (while introducing a magnetic newcomer, singer-songwriter Hazel O'Connor); Swindle, with even greater cynicism, explaining how the Sex Pistols clawed their way to notoriety in the Seventies. It's a funny, ingenious film that combines stock footage (including the late Sid Vicious rendering My Way), clever animation (to cover things that happened when no cameras were around, such as the Pistols' alleged destruction of A & M Records' London offices) and new footage incorporating the band's urbane manager, Malcolm McLaren, who narrates--hilariously. The Pistols never seemed so endearing.
On this side of the Atlantic, films have tended to view the music scene with a greater solemnity. Jiggly Bette Midler would, of course, be difficult to subdue in any milieu; but in The Rose, cast in the mold of Janis Joplin, there was no way to go but down. She did it well, though, creating a persona quite apart from that of the brassy lady we've come to know and love through her concerts, and fully merited her Oscar nomination. The industry is already considering next year's nominees--and many are willing to place bets that among them will be Sissy Spacek for her impersonation of country singer Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter. It's a rags-to-riches story, though rarely have the rags been so raggedy: and while the riches bring their inevitable problems, at least Lynn has a husband (beautifully played by Tommy Lee Jones) who stands by her. The film comes of as immensely heart-warming and appealing--largely through a sense of deadly accuracy in Spacek's performance as "the queen of country music." For extra measure, she herself sings from the Lynn repertory, and very well.
And then there's Roadie, which looks at the contemporary rock scene through the wide, innocent, benevolent eyes of Meat Loal, a rotund and genial man who's so innocent he thinks Alice Cooper is one of Charlie's Angels. So what is he doing with a touring rock band? Alas, not performing. He's the gofer and driver for the group, until promoter Don Cornelius promotes him to a kind of resident sage so he can mingle with the likes of Roy Orbison. Blondie and--yes--the real Alice Cooper. As directed by Alan Rudolph. Roadie offers an amusingly off-the-wall, but not at all unkind, view of rock egos and eccentricities away from the public eye. And newcomer Kaki Hunter contributes a nice bit as Meat Loaf's pal--a groupie virgin who's saving herself for Alice.
Nor does the teenaged parade stop there. Spurred on by the unanticipated grosses of such movies as Animal House and Mcatballs, the studios have been flooding the market with willfully zany follow-ups, hoping for a second coming of the mazuma. The list is practically endless--Foolin' Around (with Gary Busey and Annette O'Toole), Gorp (described by I'ariety as "Meatballs with overdone meat"). The Hollywood Knights (a rough assembly of every scrap of scatological humor that writer-director Floyd Mutrux could remember), Midnight Madness and Where the Buffalo Roam (Bill Murray in a vain attempt to capture the rapture that once was Hunter S. Thompson). And let's not forget Gas Pump Girls, in which Kirsten Baker and her bosomy friends disco with their partners in their bikinis but uncover their assets to build business. All of this would be depressing if there weren't also Airplane!, a truly hilarious send-up of every cliché from every Airport movie that has yet been devised, plus effective side glances at Jaws, From Here to Eternity (where two lovers, hit by a wave, emerge from the briny covered in seaweed) and Saturday Night Fever's dance contest (here transferred to a seedy waterfront disco). Its progenitors, Jim Abrahams, David and Jerry Zucker, used to do Kentucky Fried Theater, a satiric show that they moved from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, and of which they made a cinematic version. The Kentucky Fried Movie. Thanks to Airplane!, their zany humor is gaining a wider audience: it was the surprise hit of the summer.
While many of these admittedly junk movies were racking up solid grosses, the really big pictures on which the industry had been pinning its hopes--and its stars--were dying on the vine. The summer holidays and Christmas week are traditionally the most profitable times to release a movie, and all the studios hoard their best shots for those periods. By midsummer of 1980, however, it was clear that some of their biggest films, starring the likes of Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds and John Travolta, simply were not performing as expected. Ironically, the front runner throughout the summer--and by a wide margin--remained George Lucas' sequel to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, which has no stars.
There is small point in belaboring the fact that the presence of a star in a movie doesn't guarantee the presence of an audience to see it. One need only recall the disastrous Missouri Breaks of a few years ago, which co-starred Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson: Still, nobody went. To be sure, there were large audiences for Redford and Jane Fonda earlier this year, when they appeared together in The Electric Horseman, but word had gotten around that it was a fun movie, with a different kind of premise and a lot of great scenery. But Redford and Jane Alexander in Brubaker this past summer--well, the number of people who didn't want to see Redford being heroic in a grim prison drama was astronomical. Similarly, Steve McQueen and the usually astute Clint Eastwood seem to have misjudged their audiences when they went Western in Tom Horn and Bronco Billy, respectively.
What the presence of a star does guarantee is that the picture will be made. A producer's ability to announce that he has a top-level star committed to a script--any script--is like money in the bank; he can get financing, distribution, percentages, the works. And some of the summer's biggest flops had deal written all over them. Redford, with his penchant for scripts of social significance, can perhaps be forgiven for wanting to play an upright warden in a brutal and corrupt prison system, and especially since the script for Brubaker was based on the life of a noted prison reformer, Thomas O. Murton (whose views first gained wide public attention in a February 1971 Playboy Interview). Nevertheless, one had the feeling that the producer would have changed the character into Baby Face Nelson if that would have made Redford happy. The script for Rough Cut, an overly familiar caper film involving a $30,000,000 diamond heist, was so specifically tailored to the bemused charm of Burt Reynolds that producer David Merrick waited three years in order to use him as a slightly over-the-hill jewel thief with the urge to pull off one more big one. Rough Cut itself doesn't quite pull it off as a movie; the fact that four endings were shot (with two different directors) tells a lot.
Trade talk has it that Steve McQueen didn't want to do Tom Horn in the first place, that he was forced into it by a contractual obligation. If so, he certainly got his revenge. Playing a Western gun fighter hired by cattlemen to kill off rustlers, he walks through the film stoically, barely moving a muscle in his craggy face. Eastwood, on the other hand, is one actor who doesn't have to make deals. Heading his own company, Malpaso, he can put into production just about anything he chooses. If one studio won't put up the cash, he can always find another that will. With that as a basis. Eastwood has traveled far since his spaghetti-Western and Dirty Harry days. Last year, he tried his hand at comedy with Every Which Way but Loose, which was immensely successful. This year, he switched roles again with Bronco Billy, which wasn't. At Christmas, we'll see if the Loose sequel. Any Which Way You Can, can reap the rewards earned by its predecessor.
In all fairness to both McQueen and Eastwood, it should be noted that Western-oriented themes (and titles) have not been particularly popular this year. Industry people are even blaming the disappointing returns of Urban Cowboy on its title, because what else is there? John Travolta registers effectively as a redneck refinery worker who dances his nights away at Gilley's, a Houston hangout best known for its mechanical bull that challenges all riders (and practically meets its match in cute Debra Winger, who rides it as if she were in heat). It's an exceptional showcase for Travolta, who marries Winger for her bod, then takes up with Madolyn Smith because she's rich. There's also lots of country music, performed mainly by Bonnie Raitt and the Charlie Daniels Band. Small wonder the people at Paramount are wondering what went wrong.
Equally puzzling was the fate of The Long Riders, which is an authentic Western telling once again the tale of the James, Younger and Miller brothers. It had the highly publicized advantage of the brothers Keach, Carradine and Quaid in the central roles (plus Christopher and Nicholas Guest as the dastardly Fords), and a script that effectively alternated the action between bank robberies and brothels and some genuinely funny lines. When Cole Younger (David Carradine) follows Belle Starr (Pamela Reed) to Texas, he challenges her half-breed husband to a deadly knife duel. "What does the winner get?" Cole asks her. "Nothin' you both ain't already had," she replies. If Westerns are going out of fashion, they're going out with style.
Since so much of today's audience has been weaned on television, the studios are inevitably looking to TV personalities as suitable replacements for their own fading stars. (Besides, they're less expensive.) Sometimes the magic happens (Steve Martin in the otherwise abysmal The Jerk): sometimes it doesn't (Farrah Fawcett in Saturn 3). And sometimes the transition from small screen to large is so tasteless, so horrendous that one almost wishes the network censors were still calling the shots. The most egregious example is The Gong Show Movie, with Chuck Barris doing a Pagliacci bit as himself pondering whether or not the show should go on and Jaye P. Morgan taking advantage of the new freedom of an R-rated movie to flash her boobs in public. Suzanne Somers posed prettily for the cameras but hardly convinced anyone that she was a Harvard magna cum laude law grad bent on helping Donald Sutherland prevent the destruction of Canada's baby seals in Nothing Personal (a comedy!). And Gilda Live gave us Gilda Radner (of Saturday Night Live) in a virtual reprise of her one-woman Broadway show, directed by Mike Nichols, with the added attraction of Don Novello's Father Guido Sarducci, gossip columnist of the Vatican's newspaper. It's broader and raunchier than anything NBC would ever permit, but is the difference worth four or five dollars?
That's a question that might as well be asked of Radner's Saturday Night cohorts John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, in their $30,000,000 demolition derby. The Blues Brothers. Filmed in Chicago, this has size, scope and more spectacular car crashes than a decade of Indy 500s. But it's notably shy on humor as the brothers go through the time-honored tradition of putting on a show to raise money for their old parish house. Along the way, they pick up Cab Calloway, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, all of whom perform to your heart's content. So does the Blues Brothers Band. But Belush, and Aykroyd, wearing shades, are swamped not only by their rival talent but by the enormous technical resources that went into the production. They're a lot funnier when doing their shticks in NBC's venerable studio 8-H.
Youth may be having its fling in today's flicks, but so are the restless middle agers. As the year began, one of the most popular comedies with audiences of all ages was Blake Edwards' fun-filled fantasy "10". In it, diminutive Dudley Moore plays a successful composer of what one character describes as "elevator music." He may be rich, but he's not happy--not with the age of 42 staring him in the face. He wants youth, romance, vivacity; he wants, in fact, Bo Derek, even though she has just wed a bruiser twice his size. But the pursuit is on and, in this instance, at least, getting there is more than half the fun. When Moore finally gets Derek in bed, his image of the perfect 10 is shattered and he settles for Julie Andrews (which can't be all that bad). Because Edwards' script not only is witty and filled with surprises but has some sensible things to say about coming to terms with imperfection, it remains the best of a rather large bunch of social comedies dealing with middleaged would-be swingers that appeared during the year. Often they seem to have the same plot--only the locations were changed.
For Serial, based on Cyra McFadden's popular novel, the venue is ritzy Marin County, just beyond San Francisco, where pill popping and mate swapping vie with vegetarianism, religious cultism, disco dancing and Oriental sex techniques as the fad of the day. Martin Mull is terrific as the family man who stands alone, fighting off the faddists, and Sally Kellerman is outstanding as a neighbor who has to try it all. In Middle Age Crazy, the city is Houston (at least some of the exteriors are of Houston; the film was shot in Toronto), and this time it's Bruce Dern, married to Ann-Margret, who can't accept the fact that he's approaching 40. Despite her assurances that he's still as sexy as ever, he feels he has to prove himself--and does by shacking up with Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader Deborah Wakeham. New York and Hollywood provide the backgrounds for Just Tell Me What You Want, with Alan King as a mogul married to dipso Dina Merrill and Ali MacGraw as his independent-spirited mistress. The Last Married Couple in America is virtually a replay of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in which George Segal and Natalie Wood wonder why all their Beverly Hills friends are breaking up. Then Valerie Harper moves in on George, Richard Benjamin attempts to move in on Natalie--and they understand.
Interestingly enough, all of these swinging comedies lead to the same conclusion: It's back to the nest, back to the home, back to the wife (or fiancée) who always understands and forgives. This lends not only a certain sameness to the proceedings but also an odd, oldfashioned feeling, as if moviemakers were still looking apprehensively over their shoulders at the Hays Office. To be sure, they use four-letterisms more freely, are not averse to a glimpse of nudity and have few inhibitions about showing unmarried couples in bed together (how much they show depends on whether they are shooting for a PG or an R rating); but for all their freewheeling talk and their show of breaking the rules, these are essentially conformist films. That's also true of the year's straight dramatic tales. American Gigolo broke new ground of sorts by focusing upon a male prostitute (Richard Gere): this time the swinger is the woman who pays for his services (Lauren Hutton, as the bored wife of a Senator). And how does this sordid romance end up? Improbably, Hutton leaves her husband for Gere, and the finale suggests that he will be redeemed by her love.
Perhaps the only thoroughly nonconformist film of the year--certainly the most iconoclastic one--was Hal Ashby's Being There. Based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski, it introduces Peter Sellers as an innocent, a cipher of a man whose sole contact with the world is through his television set. Forced out of his sheltered existence, he thinks he can make the bad things go away by changing channels and manages to inspire impassioned (and hilarious) love in the breast of Shirley MacLaine while keeping one eye on the TV set. Because he is such a zero, prattling on about flowers and gardens, his words are taken as the wisdom of a sage by tycoons. TV personalities--even the President of the United States. In his innocence, Sellers reveals them as the fools they are. Being There offers a new, subdued, subtle Sellers in the most impressive work he's ever done, Death put a period to the brilliant career of this hard-working, hard-loving comedian in July, at the age of 54, just weeks before the release of his final film. The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu.
And perhaps the most thoroughly disappointing film of the year was Stanley Kubrick's long-awaited The Shining. Horror was big in 1980 and, backed by an extensive TV ad campaign (complete with blood gushing out of an elevator), the movie did well enough in its initial engagements--but whether well enough to offset its reported $18,000,000 negative cost the people at Warner Bros, aren't saying. Kubrick, with his customary perverseness, has taken what is essentially an old haunted-house horror tale and transplanted it to an elegant, palatial and brightly illuminated hotel where Jack Nicholson, accompanied by wife Shelley Duvall and son Danny Lloyd, is working as a caretaker for the winter. Before departing, the resident manager advises Nicholson of a previous caretaker who had gone stir crazy in this remote spot, murdering his wife and their two children. That's all Nicholson needs. Before long, he's glimpsing strange things and being lured into a forbidden room by a luscious nude in her bath. The lovely lady turns into a hag, covered with suppurating sores, and Nicholson is off on a rampage of his own, ax in hand, pursuing his wife and child.
Not since his halcyon days at the old American International studios has Nicholson been called upon to give a performance like this one. Eyes glittering, lips curled into an evil grin, laughing maniacally, he seems as if he's out to scare the hell out of the kids on Halloween. What's so puzzling in this nightmarish tale is that Kubrick doesn't seem at all sure just whose nightmare it's supposed to be. Duvall also begins to see strange sights (including two gentlemen, one in a pig's mask, doing something beastly to each other in an upstairs chamber). Worse yet, the "shining" of the title--the boy's clairvoyant understanding of the evils afoot--has nothing at all to do with the film's resolution. As a matter of fact, it's a power that he shares with Scatman Crothers, a summertime chef at the hotel, and it doesn't do Crothers much good, either. He rushes to the rescue all the way from Florida, only to be felled by Nicholson's ax. Ultimately, The Shining rattles around in its fancy settings like a pea in a shoe box.
While The Shining may have been the most disappointing, it was by no means the worst of the chillers that abounded in 1980. (Could the unanticipated success of The Amityville Horror have had anything to do with it?) Certainly, the cheapies were out in full force. There's Friday the 13th, set in a spooky summer camp that's been closed for 20 years after some unexplained deaths. Now it's about to reopen, and six counselors show up to get things ready; only one of them survives the knives, hatchets, spears and arrows hurled at them by their shadowy assailant. Don't Go in the House is a warning to young ladies not to take up with the likes of Dan Grimaldi, a victim of child abuse whose mother used to hold his arms over a stove as punishment. Now that Mommy's dead, he's out to get a little of his own back by luring girls to his room, stripping them, then putting them to the torch. Gruesome. The Visitor, with overtones of The Omen, offers Mel Ferrer as an Atlanta sportsman in league with some demonic force that wants him to impregnate his wife because she has the genes to create new demons. When he refuses, all hell breaks loose. In The Fifth Floor, disco waitress Dianne Hull is imprisoned in a loony bin presided over by sadists and rapists. The Fog is John (Halloween) Carpenter's version of the old dark house, a lonely lighthouse from which Adrienne Barbeau broadcasts warnings about the encroachment of what is literally a killer fog. And in Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, Angie Dickinson and the real-life Mrs. De Palma, Nancy Allen (both prolongedly undressed, by the way), are stalked by a psychotic transvestite wielding a gleaming straightedge razor.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel, however, is the Israeli-made I Spit on Your Grave, in which writer Camille Keaton moves to a lakeside summer house to work on her novel. Instead, a trio of local yokels goes to work on her, beating her, kicking her and knifing her in the course of a graphically depicted gang rape. Camilla gets her revenge, though, hanging one, axing another and castrating as she goes. Grisly.
Working on somewhat larger budgets, Roger Vadim assayed the form (and formula) in Night Games, wherein Beverly Hills housewife Cindy Pickett, alone in her mansion and terrorized by her memories of a childhood rape, is accosted by a mysterious, erotic intruder. The Changeling finds musicologist George C. Scott in a similar setting. When things begin to go bang in the night, he turns to Trish Van DeVere for explanations. It seems that there's a ghost, all right--a boy murdered to save his parents from shame. For an exorcism, the mansion goes up in flames, which doesn't solve anything, and George nuzzles up to Trish, which doesn't change anything. Substitute a Caribbean pirate lair for the old dark house and you have The Island, with Michael Caine as an investigative reporter trying to find out what happened to all those ships that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. It's pirates wot done 'em in, according to Peter Benchley's screenplay (from his own novel), and Caine lets go with a final fusillade that should settle the Triangle problem forever (unless you happen to remember that planes have disappeared there as well).
There are those who argue that such a display of naked violence is obscene, that mowing down some two dozen people with machine-gun fire deserves something stronger than an R. The M.P.A.A., however, continues to reserve its Xs for what it regards as hard-core sexual activity. Thus, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, with Martine Beswicke fighting off wicked movie producers, ends up with an R because the action is implied rather than shown (for example, when Beswicke invites her chauffeur to share some champagne, the camera moves outside to show the limo practically rocking off its hinges). No such visual euphemisms are resorted to in the world of the hard Xs, of course; there the trend continues to be dirtying up the better-known movie classics. The Budding of Brie is a thinly disguised All About Eve, with Hillary Summers and Jennifer Jordan in the Anne Baxter-Bette Davis roles--not as witty or sophisticated as the original, perhaps, but far more specific about the sexual shenanigans suggested in the story. Talk Dirty to Me bears more than a passing resemblance to Of Mice and Men--only it's not rabbits that big, dumb Lenny wants George to tell him about. Insatiable, another successful entry in the X genre, has the twin virtues of bringing back Marilyn Chambers and surrounding her with outstanding production values.
But the porno event of the year was the release of Bob Guccione's monumental Caligula--three years in the making (and almost as long delayed in the release) at a cost, reputedly, of over $17,000,000 and with a cast headed by the likes of Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole. This is the movie that Gore Vidal wrote, then demanded that his name be excised from. (The credit now reads, "Adapted from an original screenplay by Gore Vidal.") Guccione fired the original director, Tinto Brass, then proceeded himself to direct additional hard-core footage to, you might say, pump up his production. When it opened in New York and Los Angeles, without benefit of press previews, the ticket price was $7.50--highest ever for a nonreserved-ticket run; it was banned in Boston (and also in Italy, where it was shot).
In releasing Caligula, Guccione not only bypassed the press, he also did an end run around the M.P.A.A. Caligula doesn't carry an X, because it was never submitted for a rating. (The M.P.A.A. covers itself in these instances by issuing an automatic X.) But there's no question about what its rating would have been, because, in addition to the totally explicit detailing of just about every sexual aberration known to man (or woman) in the film's several orgy sequences, Guccione has incorporated stomach-churning scenes of maimings and torture that would turn off all but the most ardent sadist. And the irony is that this sumptuously mounted over-view of Roman decadence becomes, by its own excesses, less erotic--indeed, even anti-erotic--than the less ambitious pornos, a fact that Guccione himself noted in his defense of the film when it was seized in Boston. "I maintain that the film is actually anti-erotic," he told the Boston Municipal Court. "In every one of its explicit scenes, you'll find a mixture of gore and violence or some other rather ugly things."
The man should have been a movie critic.
"Exploration--or exploitation--of youthful sexuality isn't confined to American releases"
"Musicals have returned, underscoring the durability of this most American of all film forms"
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