“At what age should a woman stop loving?” is one of the least used of the tag lines for The Idol and yet is the one that provides the strongest narrative thread. Had the movie been filmed from the perspective of Carol, the mother, the answer to the tagline – “when her hate becomes stronger than her hunger…when her pride overcomes her passion” – might have offered audiences something with greater depth than the final movie that appeared.
The movie took a heck of a time to arrive at the May-December reversal brief love affair and the Pressbook/Marketing Manual spends more time playing up the “generation gap.” It’s one of those Pressbooks where it appears the publicity masterminds were watching a different picture to the audience.
“Highlighting the lack of communication between the younger and older generations,” spouts the Pressbook, “director Petrie shows young people as lacking in values, while pointing out it is not necessarily their fault. He thinks parents today are unwilling or unable to pass along to their children a concept of truth (“recollections vary” perhaps) – because they themselves are no longer sure of what is true, what is right and wrong.”
Really? That’s not the movie I saw. The Pressbook is on surer ground when providing background to the filming. Much of the picture was shot in unusual locations like the 300-year-old Queen’s Inn in Chelsea and Brad’s Club in the West End, redecorated for the occasion with zebra skins, spears, shields and jungle foliage, the revamp so successful with existing customers the club wanted to buy the props from the production company. Star Jennifer Jones wore creations made by Italian fashion designers Galitzino and Emilio Pucci.
Michael Parks, heralded as a great new star after his role in The Bible (1966), preferred his part here. “I’d much rather be judged by my performance in The Idol – as a complicated young man with tremendous problems.” At least his characterization echoed his own impoverished life, attending 21 schools in a peripatetic childhood. At one high school his grades prevented him taking drama classes. He lived as a hobo for a time after leaving home, then worked as a door-to-door salesman.
The 14-page landscape A3 Pressbook offers relatively few marketing ideas for prospective exhibitors. There was a paperback book tie-in by Frances Rickett from Popular Library and an album of the score from composer Johnny Dankworth and an instrumental single. Oddly enough, singer John Leyton doesn’t sing.
There was an attempt to push the fashion angle, the Pressbook arguing that “many of these fashions typify the ‘mod’ look so popular with today’s clothes-conscious women.” Exhibitors in America were urged to use travel posters of England in their lobbies, even though since the movie was shot in black-and-white it hardly presents an appealing version of the country.
Parks has supposedly competition from John Leyton as the next big thing. Leyton came from English theatrical stock, mother an actress, father an owner of music halls and trained at the Actor’s Workshop in London. “Had Leyton not catapulted to fame as a singer, it would only have been a matter of time before the public would have singled him out for stardom as a fine actor.”
Jennifer Jones, on the other hand, required no puffery to be accepted as an actress. Her breakthrough came in Song of Bernadette (1943), one of six actresses tested but the only one who could convincingly look as if she had seen “a vision.” She had married legendary producer David O. Selznick and despite her box office marquee and Oscar recognition had largely been off-screen to fulfil the same role as she does in the picture – of a mother.
The Magnificent 60s 