Surprising number of similarities to The Appointment (1969), including the aura of seediness, but lacking that film’s inherent tension or style. Lola (Anouk Aimee) is another model pursued by a another man who catches a glimpse of her in the street as in the Lumet affair. But it turns out a “model shop” is a tacky dive where men pay to take photographs of semi-naked women rather than anything to do with haute couture.
Lola is as depressed as Carla in The Appointment and for the same reason, abandoned by her boyfriend, who has gone off to gamble in Las Vegas. But new lover George (Gary Lockwood) is the antithesis of the successful Omar Sharif. You are inclined to give him a free pass because he’s got the draft hanging over him.
If he was disaffected, that could explain it. But he’s just bone idle, sponging off everyone in sight, musician friends and more ambitious girlfriend Gloria (Alexandra Hay), an actual model, though more in the commercial line than high fashion, but bringing in enough to pay his bills.
You might feel sorry for him that “the man” is trying to repossess his car until you see it’s an MG coupe that an unemployed guy could not afford and that when he does get enough cash to pay the outstanding payment he comes up with another excuse rather than parting with the money. He studied architecture but hasn’t the gumption to make his way in the adult world whereas Gloria accepts she might have to sit in a bathtub naked for a potential client if she wants to get on.
He won’t marry Gloria or give her a child so she’s full of empty threats to leave him but doesn’t carry that out until she discovers photos of Lola that he’s left lying around. There’s not much going on. It’s certainly a downmarket world. George and Gloria lived in a rundown suburb of Los Angeles with a pumpjack drilling for oil outside their front door.
A good chunk of time is spent on the road, not “out along the highway looking for adventure” as in Easy Rider (1969) and not in the great outdoors, but mindless drifting, or tailing Lola, around L.A.. There’s some kind of deadline on their romance – she’s headed home to France, his call-up is immediately imminent so unless there’s some expose of the seedier side of the city going on there’s not much else, just two people who lost their way finding brief solace in each other.
Anyone attracted by Anouk Aimee’s top billing is going to be disappointed, not in her performance, which reveals a markedly vulnerable gal beneath the glam (though she does dress haute couture). But Gary Lockwood (They Came to Rob Las Vegas, 1968) is front and central; she doesn’t turn up until about a third of the way through and only has a handful of scenes thereafter. So it’s that kind of slice-of-life movie, what the British used to term a “kitchen sink” picture, and takes place over a short time-span.
Gary Lockwood is excellent but he’s not asked to do very much, and you kind of get the impression he’s just being his charming self. Aimee seems to have cornered the market in playing “degrading” women, accused of being a sex worker in The Appointment and loaned out to high-class friends of her husband in Justine (1969). In some senses, bringing out the character behind the tawdry image appears her forte. Alexandra Hay (Skidoo, 1968) is equally good, the grit behind the glam, not just a pretty face.
But just nothing happens. The background – the draft, potential Vietnam peace talks, the occasional joint – is scarcely a visceral snapshot of America at the time. European director looks at America and doesn’t much like what he sees, but less obviously a commentary on society along the lines of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point the following year or even the home-grown Medium Cool (1969).
And lacking the style of Demy’s previous outing, the exuberant musical The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and you keep on expecting – hoping – the characters are going to burst into song. Oddly enough, it suffers from an unexpected culture clash. Relocate the same characters and the same story to Paris, speaking French with subtitles, and it would have worked better no matter how slight the story because it would automatically be infected by Gallic charm and even the poorer streets there would be interesting.
Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces, 1970) a.k.a. Adrien Joyce contributed to Demy’s screenplay. Members of rock band Spirit appear in the film and provide several tracks but there was no soundtrack album to take advantage of their involvement.
You might be interested to know that Harrison Ford was at one time up to play the lead. Hay was a starlet under contract to Columbia who financed the film. Equally oddly, it was not sufficiently arthouse to appeal to the cognoscenti and it was little surprise that the studio eventually chose to promote the seedier aspects in the marketing.
I thought I’d be taking one for the team in tracking down this much-maligned Raquel Welch number. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. Oh, the movie’s nothing to write home about, desultory home invasion thriller that fails to come close to Kitten with a Whip (1964), Wait until Dark (1967) or The Penthouse (1967). But La Welch is something of a revelation.
Forget the Las Vegas go-go dancer come-on, this is more of a gentle romance. While attractive, Welch dispenses with the bra-busting outfits and overt sexiness, settling for a girl-next-door persona. In fact, you could have dumped the entire murder plot and had a more interesting picture, along the lines of Fade In (1969) where the normal hot-to-trot Burt Reynolds plays a gentler character.
Artistic license taken to an extreme. Raquel Welch is a brunette not a redhead.
Since, (spoiler alert) in her sole dance number Welch keeps her attributes well-hidden, the producers felt obliged to stick in some topless dancers (quite how Welch is permitted to keep her clothes on in a topless go-go bar is never explained) which gives the picture a sleazy feel that runs counter to the tone of the romance.
So, Michele (Raquel Welch) is on the run from nutjob killer Alan (Luke Askew) who has bumped off his ex- Nikki (Sandra Giles) and her friend Iris (Pat Delaney). But why Michele is in the killer’s sights is never satisfactorily explained, except that she purportedly turned Nikki against him. Michele swaps Las Vegas for Los Angeles, finding work in another go-go bar and romance with Joe (James Stacy) whose interest in bull-fighting might have scared her off. But that’s tempered by his enthusiasm for flying model airplanes (an important plot point it transpires).
Cops are on the killer’s trail but not before he bumps off a guy who gave him a lift. Michele’s not hard to find, a drug addict employee of the Las Vegas operation points him in the right direction. There’s some desultory car chase footage and for no reason at all a chase on foot through an old zoo (presumably a genuine old zoo).
I had half-expected there might have been a lion or snake left behind to ramp up the thrill-quotient, but no such luck. What we do get, however, is a rarity in the chase department – exhaustion. Most people being chased on foot manage to drum up an insane amount of energy. Michele, on the other hand, is on the point of collapse.
But she’s not dumb. She might be rootless, not the questing soul of Easy Rider, but driven away by parental issues and, in gaining independence not keen on surrendering it to any passing male. And come the climax, she’s got a nasty weapon up her sleeve.
Essentially, she’s a sweet gal. Not the kind of character you’d expect La Welch to be playing, and perhaps that’s what attracted her to the script. It gives the actress the opportunity to escape from her sexy persona, and, while the tale is hardly weighty, the chance to prove she can do more than hide behind her particulars. Innocence isn’t something you’d associate with Raquel Welch, but here she exudes more of that than earthiness or sex appeal.
James Stacy (star of Welch’s debut picture A Swingin’ Summer, 1965) is a likeable boyfriend, not the kind trying to hustle her into bed. Luke Askew (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968) doesn’t do much except play mean.
James Neilson (The Moon-Spinners, 1964), while not able to jazz up a rancid plot, allows, as he did with Hayley Mills (an odd comparison indeed), Welch the chance to grow up on screen, defusing her sexuality but allowing her space to create a character so far removed from anything previously seen. But the tempo sags with over-reliance on dancing sequences, the Las Vegas backdrop and too much chasing that goes nowhere. Mark Rodgers (Let’s Kill Uncle, 1966) dreamt this up.
One perhaps for completionists. Lack of sexy scenes might be off-putting but, equally, you might want to see what Welch can do when playing against type.
She sings, she dances, she shakes her booty. What else would you expect from Ann-Margret in light comedic mode (i.e. The Swinger, 1966) rather than serious drama (i.e. Stagecoach, 1966). While appearing as free-and-easy as in The Swinger, she’s actually a dedicated virgin, as was par for the course before the Swinging Sixties kicked in. But the way she lets it all hang out, you’d be forgiven (if you were a predatory male) for guessing the opposite.
Maggie (Ann-Margret) is a career girl, assistant fashion buyer in a New York store, having come up the hard way, small-town-girl then model then salesperson. When the Paris buyer Irene (Edie Adams) quits her job to get married, Maggie is shipped out as her replacement, not as a reward for all her hard work but as punishment because she refuses to sleep with the boss’s cocky son Ted (Chad Everett). The idea is she’ll be so out of her depth, she’ll return humiliated and only too happy to jump into bed.
What do poster designes have against certain colors? In the movie Ann-Margret dances in blue. In the poster, the dress turns red.
Turns out Irene quit so fast she didn’t have time to tell her Parisian boyfriend and fashion designer Marc (Louis Jourdan) so on Maggie’s first night in the company’s luxurious apartment he turns up. Naturally, he expects a bit of the old-fashioned quid pro quo, je ne sais quoi, whatever they call sex when they are being coy about it, and when she refuses to play ball he cables New York to demand her dismissal. Even when the New York boss (John McGiver) relents, she is banned from Marc’s fashion shows, meaning she can’t buy clothes she is forbidden to view.
Enter Ted’s buddy Herb (Richard Crenna), from the same lothario mold. Just to even things up or add further complication, Ted realizes he is actually in love with a girl who said no after a thousand boring girls who said yes. Trying to win her way back into Marc’s good books, with Herb as her guide she tracks the designer through the night clubs, eventually putting on the kind of sexy wild impromptu dance exhibition that the more staid Maggie could only have achieved if she’d taken lessons from Ann-Margret.
That does the trick and they share an impromptu number (“Paris Lullaby”) on the banks of the Seine although Marc still insists she shed her inhibitions before marriage if she wants to be considered a true Parisienne. The arrival of Mark and then Irene, abandoning her husband on their honeymoon when called in to retrieve the situation, adds fuel to the fire and then it’s one mishap after another, especially when Maggie discovers the pleasures of absinthe and ends up in Herb’s bed (yep, she has a hell of a time wondering not just how she got there but if, Heavens to Murgatroyd as Snagglepuss would say, she committed the terrible deed).
Unbelievably, and just as well perhaps from the narrative perspective, Herb isn’t a love rival. Maggie isn’t his type, its transpires. Shoot that man on sight – doesn’t fancy Ann-Margret? Lock him up!
You won’t be surprised to learn that it all sorts itself out in the end but you might be a bit taken aback how quickly a dedicated career girl throws away her career once a marriage proposal comes her way.
You might have expected from the title that Maggie would be a model, the best excuse you could find for the actress to cavort in a series of skimpy costumes, as she does in the pre-credit sequence, an exquisite dialogue-free montage with a clever pay-off that makes you think this is going to be much more stylish – excluding the fashion show of course – than it is.
Ann-Margret has such a dazzling screen persona she makes light work of even the lightest of confections. She does all that her most fervent fans would want but it’s not her fault she’s been cast in a Doris Day comedy that ensures she can only properly express her character by acts of exhibition. Louis Jourdan (Can-Can, 1960) keeps creepy entitlement at bay with lashings of Gallic charm. Despite his character’s playboy tag, Chad Everett (The Impossible Years, 1968) is the squarest of squares.
Richard Crenna (The Midas Run, 1969) spins his normal hard-ass screen persona into something a bit more sympathetic. Edie Adams (The Honey Pot, 1967) and John McGiver (Fitzwilly/Fitzwilly Strikes Back, 1967) add a bit of dash in support.
You’d never guess the director was Boris Sagal of The Omega Man (1971) fame. Stanley Roberts (Come September, 1961) wrote the screenplay.
Ann-Margret at her zingiest. What more could you ask?
Angie Dickinson fans would be entitled to cry foul after the top-billed female star appears to be engaged in a bait-and-switch tactic. After a lengthy wait, when she finally does appear it’s only to high-tail it off to Switzerland leaving behind in Rome lover Troy Donohue. Her departure creates romantic opportunity, her return complication.
And is this the same Delmer Daves, you might ask, who made his name in a series of male-dominated westerns such as Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957)? Yes, it is, but once Daves had finished applying intense pressure to his male coterie, he did the same, in a different genre, to women.
Young teacher Prudence (Suzanne Pleshette) exerts her independence by quitting her job after being hauled over the coals in Small Town U.S.A. for teaching her pupils a controversial novel. On the boat to Rome she encounters Italian lothario Roberto (Rossano Brazzi), who holds the lofty sexist opinion that only a man can turn a girl into a woman, and the nerdy Albert (Hampton Fincher), both of whom come a-courting, the youngster’s diffidence ruling him out of serious contention.
Roberto is friends with student Don (Troy Donohue) but the minute he is introduced to Prudence he has to rush off to try to persuade artist Lyda (Angie Dickinson) not to leave. Roberto turns gracefully aside after Prudence denies him sex (put more subtly than that of course) and she, finding employment in an American bookshop (speaking the language no deterrent there), embarks on romance with Don, fluent in Italian, who teaches her how to drink strega, takes her to jazz clubs and acts as tour guide.
A good chunk of the picture, it has to be said, is a travelogue, and when neither Roberto nor Don are on hand to point out this or that monument or embark on a potted history, suddenly she discovers an interior monologue to do the job. And at one point it turns into If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Pisa as the couple take off on a longer trip, bouncing from one tourist city to another, the route only complicated by some slight comedy over whether they should share a bed.
Re-titled in the U.K. and sent out with the most curious support.
Another decade and sex would most definitely be on the cards and the story would sink under an unplanned pregnancy or a fit of pique and scenes in a bedroom where they are separated by an open suitcase as one or other makes an effort to leave. But it’s the virginal aspects that makes this so sweet and for sure no director has managed to clear entire streets in usually heavily-congested tourist spots to deliver beautiful scenes in such scenic spots.
Actual drama might be light on the ground, but there’s no denying Delmer Daves knows how to apply pressure, this time on the woman, who can either treat romance as a fleeting youthful episode or use it to launch big time into marriage and womanhood. Without a chaperone, unlike the hapless Albert, Prudence has only the example of her predatory employer who takes a male every season.
Just when the romance looks all set, back in Rome she catches Lyda and Don in a clinch and this sparks some good old verbal sparring between the two women as Lyda makes it very clear that Don is no virgin and that Prudence is out of her league.
You can guess how it will end. It’s as lightweight a confection as you will ever watch and yet it is worth watching because the director, close-up at the ready, scarcely gives Prudence a moment’s peace and if ever a director know how to gauge female intent and rely on eyes to express emotion it’s Daves.
Look beneath the façade of the travelogue and you find a woman trapped on the brink, that spark of independence misleading men into thinking she will surrender her virginity, and the woman not wanting to be another notch on a bedpost no matter if that fulfils the dual purpose of achieving womanhood. Daves’ name on the picture should be warning enough this isn’t quite your normal fluffy romance.
If you can ignore the sexism that dictates that a woman’s role is to “anchor” a man, turn his flightiness to one side and by some alchemy make him the best he can be, the narrative edges towards the independence of women, both Lyda and the bookshop owner pick and choose and sometimes abuse their men, and Prudence rejects romance on the rebound with Roberto.
But, of course, if that’s all you want, and you don’t want to hover near consequence, then writer-director Daves delivers a seamless concoction. If there’s an old-fashioned conceit to the whole thing, it’s perhaps because the source material, Lovers Must Learn, was written three decades before and preceded the likes of The Group in presenting a young woman as independent rather than merely yearning for marriage and motherhood.
It seems odd for Angie Dickinson to be relegated to the supporting cast but possibly having already done her Vespa-riding number in Jessica (1962) she preferred a stab at a more mature role, though she had already gone down that route in The Sins of Rachel Cade (1962). Maybe she upset someone in the studio. Maybe her role was bigger but ended up on the cutting room floor when Daves realized the talent he had uncovered in Suzanne Pleshette (A Rage To Live, 1965).
Daves worked again with Rossano Brazzi on the director’s final picture The Battle of the Villa Florita (1965) and Pleshette had a short-lived marriage with Troy Donohue.
Woefully underrated. Remove the weight of expectation and you’re left with a bittersweet romance. This just wasn’t what critics anticipated from stars Dustin Hoffman, coming off the back of Midnight Cowboy (1969), and Mia Farrow, previous film the coruscating Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and certainly it seemed there was resentment at the audacity of British director Peter Yates attempting to switch from his action roots, best shown in Bullitt (1968). Worse, that Yates was trying to introduce a New Wave vibe.
In the end-up it’s sweet, but getting there is a prickly affair and it’s precisely this unique approach that creates its appeal. Where the standard set-up comprises meet-cute, break-up, back together, for the most part this looks as if actual romance, as opposed to sex, will never get off the ground, the pair smothered by doubt expressed in internal monologue.
Whereas, in The Fixer (1969), for example, hearing a character speak of their feelings outside of dialogue almost torpedoes the picture, here it works a treat, because it’s dealt with as if it was dialogue of the unspoken variety. Past experience that forces both characters to make suppositions about the other’s intent creates a very amusing and essentially true barrier to progress.
Back in the day, at the dawn of the singles generation, the idea of two young people hooking up for one-night stands filled the moral majority with shock, not just that widespread use of the Pill in avoiding pregnancy invoked promiscuity, but that random encounters immediately ended up in the bedroom rather than the becoming the start of a wooing (and discovery) process. These days, of course, Tinder and other such social media inventions, create umpteen opportunities for attraction to translate into instant sex.
But it doesn’t reduce the type of anxieties that are so well addressed here.
You can start with the basic morning-after notion of “how do I get rid of her?” all the way through to assuming such easy attitudes to sex on either side would destroy an ongoing relationship, and along the way dipping into such minefields as how to get to know another person, does he/she even like me or would they fall into bed with the first person to ask them, are they even as attractive in the cold light of day than when perceptions are muddied by alcohol and excitement, and, of course, the ultimate, was performance up to scratch.
The Carlton was one of the smaller London West End cinemas and often used for prestigious openings to create the hold-overs that would build audience awareness and, such as here with box office increasing week-on-week, encourage cinema bookings.
This takes the unusual route of being peppered with flashback while the pair engage in spikier dialogue than you would find in the standard Hepburn-Tracy Hudson-Day romcom. And often what they say is the opposite of what they feel. Setting off in several directions at once – back a year or so, taking in the activity of the previous night and ploughing through the current day – could be off-putting but I found it worked a treat.
Anal retentive domesticated furniture designer John (Dustin Hoffman) hooks up in a singles bar with untidy politically-motivated sometime-actress Mary (Mia Farrow). His first reaction on waking up is to explore the apartment (rather large for New York), wonder when his wife will return, and think of all the deceptions he could pull. His first reaction borders on pure fear: she’s already planning to move in.
That neither has a genuine idea of the other person’s feeling provides the movie’s dynamic and the entire movie consists of them adjusting their expectations against a very contemporary backdrop of protests, politics, cinema verite and sex. Though primarily non-sexist and quite gender-equal, she isn’t looking to become a kept woman, for example, it does touch upon the notion that an easily-available woman is not far short of a whore, whereas, naturally, a promiscuous male is entitled to a free pass.
Her last relationship was with a married man (Michael Tolan), but she dropped him once he started talking about divorcing his wife. For John, girlfriend Ruth (Sunny Griffin) dramatically upped the stakes, arriving at his apartment with luggage, items of furniture and a rampant dog, enforcing on John responsibilities he did not want. Unusually, for the era, he is not politically involved and can cook, both of which attributes/skills we discover are the result of a mother so committed to politics that she neglected her children, never stocked her fridge and left her children to fend for themselves.
Each could press the nuclear button at any time. They’re attractive singles so more sex is just round the corner, going their separate ways the easier option, building a relationship far more difficult.
Dustin Hoffman shakes off a lot of the tics that were already showing and would inhibit later performances in a character far removed in sexual confidence from The Graduate (1967), but in some ways still touchingly naïve, and delivers a very believable performance. That it doesn’t fall into the usual Tracy-Hepburn battle of the sexes with witty put-downs owes much to the highly-nuanced performance of Mia Farrow who isn’t, as you might expect, in the least fragile and expresses her independence and challenges his views in a non-aggressive fashion.
Completely ignored by the Oscars, technically it won plaudits from Bafta, bracketed with Midnight Cowboy for Dustin Hoffman picking up the Best Actor Award, and with Rosemary’s Baby and Secret Ceremony for Mia Farrow in being nominated for Best Actress – such arcane rules later changed.
In small parts look out for Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles, 1974), Tyne Daly (Cagney and Lacey TV series 1981-1988), Don Siegel’s son Kristoffer Tabori (Journey through Rosebud, 1972) and Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck, 1987). John Mortimer (Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965) wrote the screenplay from the Mervyn Jones bestseller.
Cinematically and narratively refreshing, manages to be entertaining and thoughtful at the same time.
Kevin Billington’s debut benefitted from a brief fad for classical music soundtracks, Elvira Madigan kicking off the fashion the year before, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which opened at the same time as Interlude, trumping everything in sight. And as luck would have it, this was not the only movie about an orchestra conductor, Counterpoint with Charlton Heston released in America a couple of months before this one opened in Britain.
What makes the movie so enjoyable is that overlaying the sumptuous love story is the angst of a mistress. It’s sweetly set in wonderful British locations, riverside inns, olde worlde hotels, trendy restaurants, a few flashes of swinging London, luxurious mansions. The solid backdrop for something as fragile as romance.
There could not be two more opposites to attract, the rich Oskar Werner (Jules and Jim, 1962) in full-on arrogant mode, all dark glasses and leather gloves with enough petulance to sink a barge, and journalist Barbara Ferris (off screens since the lamentable Catch Us If You Can three years before) who lives in a bedsit with a goldfish called Rover. He drives a Rolls-Royce convertible, she a Mini.
There are some very good touches. We first see the characters in mirrors. He plays a “concerto for wine glass and index finger.” There is the very serious British business of whether milk goes in first to a cup of tea.
The screenplay by Lee Langley and Irish playwright Hugh Leonard is sharp and often witty. “I want to marry you,” says Ferris, before conceding, “I just don’t want to be your wife.” There is clear realization of the nature of his personality in her remark, “Instead of being what you want, I’ll be what you’ve got.”
Even when emotion is expressed there is a feeling that a lot is still suppressed. Ferris goes from high excitement to high dudgeon and carries within the seed of fear, a character who spends as much time in terror as in love. This is exacerbated when she spots of Werner’s wife, stoically played by Virginia Maskell, at the hairdressers and “all of the sudden” the wife who has existed in her imagination “has a face.”
John Cleese and Donald Sutherland have decent cameos, the former in a bit of an in-joke as a PR man wanting to get into comedy (“satire – that’s my field”), the latter as the womanizing brother of Werner’s wife.
Oddly enough, the music – Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Dvorak, Brahms and Rachmaninov – acts in the same manner as Easy Rider the following year, as extensive interludes to the developing drama. Perhaps it is where Dennis Hopper got the idea.
It is very rounded for a romance, the acting excellent and the undernote of despair well-wrought.
You might have thought it the height of Hollywood hubris for James Cameron to assume Titanic could steal the Valentine’s Day crown from Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman World War Two lovelorn Casablanca (1942). But bear in mind Casablanca had replaced Doctor Zhivago (1965) as the movie’s greatest love story and that, in turn, had superseded Gone with the Wind (1939).
Each followed a similar recipe – cataclysmic event, except Casablanca epic in scope, except Gone with the Wind memorable song, except Clark Gable introducing relative newcomers, perhaps most of all fabulous screen charisma between the male and female leads. Titanic, of course, has a late twentieth century vibe, more action than drama as the lovers, often pursued, hurtle from one potential disaster to another, and are within a lifejacket and a large enough piece of flotsam of a happy ending.
But where Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) exhibited world-weary cynicism and Zhivago (Omar Sharif), though his occupation, achieved maturity, Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) are little more than blossoms blown on the wind, as innocent as a fresh coat of paint. Jack grows up fast, fast enough to hold his own among the upper class, strong enough to whisk Rose away from a life of servitude to a male ideal.
In some respects, to use the modern idiom, she is the ultimate Final Girl. On several occasions, she rescues him, plunging through the rising torrent to find him and cleave his handcuffs with an axe. She risks far more than he. Vengeful fiancé Cal (Billy Zane) and his ruthless henchman (David Warner) would easily chuck Jack overboard given the chance.
In essence, the story is light. Spoiled brat saved from a half-hearted suicide attempt, Jack embraced by Cal as a means of humiliating him, various attempts to smear Jack, Rose finding a freedom below stairs she never expected, shown a world of opportunity beyond her ken, taking the lead in sexual matters, lightly mocking Jack for blushing at her nudity even as she shamelessly and confidently strips.
And told against the backdrop of a ruthless caste system, where only the “better” people can survive and millionaires see “winning” as the embodiment of entitlement. Cameron holds up a mirror to the supposedly classless America and a world of enterprise where lifeboats are viewed as an obstacle to beautiful design. The two outsiders, Rose’s mother (Frances Fisher) and Molly Brown (Kathy Bates) are opposites, the latter, by dint of inheritance pushing her way brusquely into society, the former meekly trading her daughter for a life of privilege.
And the romance is given a twist when cold-blooded Cal proves to be as obsessed by Rose as Jack, the several times offered safe passage turning it down to pursue her, and not in the end as an object to be collected but as the subject of his restrained passion.
But you would need extraordinary acting to keep you glued to the screen when there were so many other astonishing visuals and even at the distance of a quarter of a century the power of DiCaprio and Winslet just blows you away. Sure, there is a bit of will she-won’t she, but once we’re past that it’s romance as a breath of fresh air, DiCaprio mixes devil-may-care with adoration, Winslet bristles, succumbs and then takes the lead, the sheer exhilaration of it all the bulwark against the drama of the slowly sinking ship.
It’s a fabulous scenario, Cameron careful to allow other elements to float into place, the officers assuming sacrificial stance, the hunt for the mythical jewel that kicks off the tale and provides meaningful coda.
I’m sure it helped that DiCaprio and Winslet were mere rising stars, otherwise I doubt if someone with more box office clout would have stood for the endless hours/days/weeks in freezing cold water (I don’t think you could heat it up even in a studio setting) and without their genuine travails it would not have worked so well.
It’s worth noting that DiCaprio went on to become – along with Brad Pitt – the last of the genuine stars and that he forsook the easy route of romantic lead for more interesting and complex characters and embraced an association with Martin Scorsese that took him to darker places than the likes of Paul Newman or Harrison Ford ever dreamed. Winslet, too, has enjoyed a memorable career, perhaps entranced too often by the arthouse, but you can hardly argue with one Oscar and six nominations.
On a personal note, I realised I had passing acquaintance with two of the actors. When I worked backstage at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, I would often come across Jonathan Hyde (the arrogant Ismay). One role he played quite astonished me. Not so much the role (and I can’t remember what it was) but, if you like, the preamble. When audiences entered the theatre they were faced with the sight of Hyde sitting on stage in full costume and in character, as if this was Method Acting taken to an extreme, waiting for the play to begin.
I was at university with Ron Donachie (the master at arms). We both studied Drama at Glasgow University. This course was never intended to produce actors, and mostly it set students on a path to theatre management and the like, including a friend Anne Bonnar who went on to head up Creative Scotland. But, of course, it was always a route into acting if that was your ambition. Ron Donachie and another friend Duncan Bell (British television series Heartbeat) took the opportunity. Needless to say, my stint at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was enough to convince me that acting was not my forte.
Julie Andrews could not have made a more controversial choice in her bid to prove she was more than a Hollywood goody two-shoes as introduced in her debut Mary Poppins (1964). In the months leading up to release, The Americanization of Emily movie made all the wrong sort of headlines, aligning the innocent Andrews with the unsavory matter of producer Martin Ransohoff (The Cincinnati Kid, 1965) challenging the all-powerful Production Code, the self-censorship system in operation in the United States until the late 1960s.
Ransohoff demanded the right to include four scenes of substantial nudity in the film, at a time when any flashes of skin in mainstream pictures were taboo. He argued that the scenes were “necessary for the farcical overtones of the picture.” But more to the point, he was annoyed that foreign filmmakers, who did not have to abide by the stringent rulings of the Code, could show nudity, sometimes even condoned by censor Geoffrey Shurlock who accepted their artistic validity. Ransohoff railed: “We are losing our market because we allow pictures that are full of nudity done in an artistic manner to play our top houses but we can’t get into them because the Code robs us of our artistic creativity.”
I’m not sure exactly when MGM dropped the “Americanization” element from the title and made Julie Andrews the star by promoting her image more than that of top-billed James Garner.
Faced with a lawsuit from studio MGM for delivering a movie not fit for the Code, Ransohoff conceded he had gone “overboard” with the nudity and that Judy Carne – who later sprang to fame in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In (1969-1973) – in particular, was “over exposed.” Other actresses named as revealing too much were Janine Gray (The Pumpkin Eater, 1964) and Kathy Kersh in her movie debut. The women were identified in the movie credits as, disgracefully, “Nameless Broad.”
At the outset, such agitation would not have preyed so much on Andrews’ mind as a possibly limitation in her future career, Mary Poppins not due to be unveiled until the summer and few members of the public aware of what a game-changer that would prove for studio and star alike. But once Mary Poppins hit the box office heights, there was every chance the star would quickly lose the adoration of the public if seen to play the female lead in a steamy picture. Ransohoff complicated matters by failing to come out and say whether Andrews was involved in the nude scenes, no matter they were considerably toned down by the time the movie hit cinemas in October 1964. (Had he delayed the picture’s release six months, his approach might have been deemed more acceptable, as, by that time, a flash of breasts had been passed by Shurlock for The Pawnbroker.)
It had been a troubled picture from the start. As early as 1962, Oscar-winner William Holden (The World of Suzie Wong, 1960) had been signed up to star and the movie was due to go before the cameras in London in July 1963 and, following a slight delay, re-scheduled for the next month under the direction of Oscar-winner William Wyler (Ben-Hur, 1959). Production was not quite settled because Andrews was only hired in September 1963. But when Wyler pulled out a month later he was quickly followed by Holden. Andrews was such an unknown quantity that when she signed up, the news did not even receive a headline in Variety, just a few lines at the bottom of a page.
And there were screenplay issues. Norman Rosten had begun work on the adaptation of the William Bradford Huie bestseller in April 1962 only for, 10 months later, the author to be drafted in. But scripting problems would continue until after shooting was complete (see below) with the filmmakers unable to make up their mind about the tone of the picture.
Despite Rosten being assigned, a story later emerged that the book had struggled to reach Hollywood. Huie contended that it had, after all, not been sold to Ransohoff in 1962 and that the sale only occurred later after the author had written the screenplay on spec and sold it to the producer. He tied this up with another contention, little borne out by fact, that producers had turned against buying blockbuster novels in favour of original screenplays.
At that point Ransohoff was on a roll as one of the biggest independent producers in Hollywood, on his slate The Sandpiper, which would appear in 1965, Topkapi (1964), The Loved One (1965), The Wheeler Dealers (1963) and The Americanization of Emily, a fantastic batting average for a neophyte producer. Emily would be his third production, The Sandpiper, with two of the biggest stars in the world, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, his fourth.
James Garner, who had blown his entire fee of $100,000 from three years’ work on television series Maverick on getting out of his contract with Warner Brothers, had been given a helping hand by Ransohoff, winning second billing behind Kim Novak in Boys Night Out (1962) and Lee Remick in The Wheeler Dealers. Ransohoff gambled Garner was ready to make the jump up to top billing in The Americanization of Emily.
In fact, it would take several years before Garner was considered a proper star, thanks to Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), with the kind of marquee appeal that produced box office commensurate with his fees. In fact, James Coburn was considered a better prospect with a seven-picture deal with Twentieth Century Fox – for whom he would make his breakthrough movie Our Man Flint (1966) – a five-film deal with Ransohoff and Major Dundee (1965) on the starting grid with Columbia.
The three-minute sequence of the D-Day beach landing cost $250,000. It was shot in California, sixty miles north of Hollywood, on a public beach though anyone happening upon the site would possibly be put off by signs proclaiming “Explosives next ½ mile.” The shoot involved 5,000lb of explosives, mostly dynamite and black powder, planted in iron tubs buried in the sand and connected by wires to a central control board. The complicated set-up involved four cameras rolling simultaneously with a 250ft high crane lifting a camera platform into the sky for aerial shots. Another platform was sited in the surf. Special effects expert Paul Byrd was on hand to point out to participants where explosions would occur. Eighty smoke pots were lit, each in an assigned position. Rehearsals soaked James Garner and while he waited for the scene to be set up again he lay down on the beach, still in n his wet clothes, but covered in a towel.
Preparing the segment had taken four months with bulldozers clearing the area. Ransohoff himself climbed into a camera platform to test the rig. Camera positions were selected to capture close-ups of the actors going ashore. To maximize daylight the lunch break was limited to 30 minutes.
Ransohoff, as much a maverick in marketing as in production, took out a double-page advertisement in Variety in July 1964 – nearly four months before the movie opened – to promote the response of the preview audiences. And although the comment cards returned easily promotable lines like “you have a blockbuster on your hand” and “one of those rare films that combine tragedy, comedy and drama properly,” Ransohoff was clearly intending to continue to court controversy by including quotes along the lines of “I’m broadminded but this time you’ve gone too far” and “a disturbing and terrible thing.”
But you couldn’t argue with Ransohoff seeking an alternative marketing strategy with such a recalcitrant publicist as Garner. The actor had a marked aversion to talking about his private life, which, of course, meant the focus would have to shift to his dubious star quality or the controversial scenes. Nothing infuriated journalists more, especially in those days when the media was not so tightly controlled, than to turn up for an interview with an actor who had nothing to say. “My private life is just that and I’ll keep it that way,” he averred.
Quite why the movie took so long to open is not really a mystery. Sneak previews might be followed by a little tweaking but the film would expect to be in cinemas within a month or so, the previews intended to build public awareness and word-of-mouth buzz rather than tell the director where he had gone wrong. But clearly Ransohoff held back in order to capitalize on the box office of Mary Poppins. Despite the wrangling with the Code being over and done with by March 1964 and the preview taking place three months later, the film did not open until October, going wide at Xmas, with the additional purpose of aiming for Oscar voters.
Even as Ransohoff was adding the finishing touches to the advertising campaign, there were doubts about what kind of picture the public would be shown. Four endings were considered, two filmed with Edison (James Garner) dead which turned the movie into a straightforward black comedy, but the other two retained the romantic ending.
The black comedy approach dictated that the unsuspecting Edison (James Garner) was lured to his death on Omaha Beach by the glory-hunting Cummings (James Coburn). With no return from the dead, this left Emily (Julie Andrews) in one version to carry the movie to a dutiful conclusion, commiserating with Admiral Jessup, who had been committed to a mental asylum, while a parade commemorating Edison’s sacrifice and led by the treacherous Cummings took place in the background. This was junked when the parade prove too expensive an addition.
All the other endings kept Edison alive, but in one, partly filmed, Cummings was banished to the North Pole, the producers going as far as to film Coburn with penguins.
The major adjustment in all versions was to present Jessup as off his head when he conceived the plan. That meant the Navy could not be blamed for outrageous publicity-seeking, with the finger instead pointed at a maverick officer, whose decisions could be tempered by his temporary instability.
SOURCES: “Holden’s Americanization,” Variety, May 23, 1962, p11; “Screenplay (Ready to Shoot) Cost-Conscious Producers Goal in Retreat from Pre-Sold,” Variety, January 30, `1963, p3; “Emily Screenplay to Be Done by William Bradford Huie,” Box Office, February 11, 1963, pW1; “Ransohoff’s Big Spurt of Features,” Variety, February 17, 1963, p3; “Ransohoff To Start Five Films in 6 Month Period,” Box Office, June 17, 1963, p27; “Julie Andrews,” Variety, September 11, 1963, p16; “Bill Holden Follows Wyler in Leaving Emily,” Box Office, October 7, 1963, pW2; “Garner Gets Emily Lead,” Box Office, October 14, 1963, p9; Michael Fessier Jr., “Can’t Be Americanized With Duds On,” Variety, November 20, 1963, p5; “Martin Ransohoff To Seek Production Code Seal,” Box Office, November 26, 1963, p6; “Emily and Her Attire Settled,” Variety, March 25, 1964, p5;“Nudies In Emily Are Cut to Get MPAA’s Seal,” Box Office, March 30, 1964, pW4; “Advertisement,” Variety, July , 1964, p14; “Admiral’s Glory Seeking Is Final Ending of Metro’s Emily,” Variety, November 4, 1964, p5; “Mad Film Promotion,” Variety, November 4, 1964, p15; “Promo Credo of Hollywood Actor,” Variety, November 4, 1964, p15; Action on the Beach (1964) MGM promotional featurette.
Dramatically undernourished coming-of-age tale over-reliant on “authentic” travelogue and continuing the transformation of Hayley Mills from child to adult star, although that change had been clearly wrought by her previous outing in The Family Way (1966) which had contained her first nude scene. While there’s definitely way more sex here it’s all off-screen.
In Singapore, family black sheep Robert (Trevor Howard) tries to stifle romance blossoming between his ugly duckling niece Polly (Hayley Mill) and local king of the fixers Amaz (Shashi Kapoor), to quote from list of the clichés the screenplay happily summons up. Polly is the bespectacled, dowdy, shy travelling companion to snippy aunt (Brenda de Banzie) – Robert’s sister not wife – who resides in a magnificent suite in Raffles Hotel, consigning her niece to a hovel of a room. When said aunt drops dead in the swimming pool, Polly, wasting no time on mourning, is free to turn butterfly, channeling her inner Brigitte Bardot with bouffant hairstyle and tight red dress.
The genial Amaz is on hand as a guide, in sexual matters as well as tourist, until huffing-and-puffing plantation manager Robert threatens to intervene and smarmy American Critch (Peter Bayliss) attempts to sweep her off her feet. And that’s about it, plot-wise. The meandering story provides insights into different aspects of local culture – Whicker’s World was the only globe-trotting television series available at the time so all this would probably have entranced moviegoers rather than, as now, bored them to death.
Perhaps what’s most interesting is what’s left unsaid or never dwelt upon, of the posh English girl having sex with a native of Singapore. In previous movies – Bhowani Junction et al – miscegenation would have been the sole plot point with Brits up in arms at the suggestion of it. Here, the only objection to Amaz is that he’s a bit of a Casanova, practised seducer in the main of older women. While Amaz falls in love, Polly is considerably more objective, viewing their relationship in terms of rite-of-passage, rather an un-British approach, more in keeping with the attitudes those bold females exhibited in pictures like The Group (1966).
Polly is a pretty cool-headed kid, with a good head for booze, not staggering in gutters or throwing up after imbibing too much, alert to the intentions of Critch and more than capable of putting her uncle in his place. Despite her delight at enjoying sex Polly is more independent than you might imagine and the film’s actually a character study of a woman refusing to be defined – or trapped – by love and its obvious consequence marriage and viewing this new freedom as merely the starting point of her life.
For Hayley Mills fans, of course, her career divides sharply into Disney and post-Disney. Few child stars ever manage to take the first steps to an adult career never mind sustain one, but the actress made a good stab at throwing off her previous precocious screen persona by taking on challenging roles that perhaps upset her core followers. But the film would have benefitted from a better storyline and minus the distracting tourist elements been a lot tighter.
The career of Trevor Howard, long-time second male lead, was on a bit of an upswing after sterling roles in Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and The Long Duel (1967) and although he remained the scowler supreme he brings more vulnerability to this role. Bollywood heartthrob Shashi Kapoor had come to prominence as far as the English-speaking countries were concerned through arthouse director James Ivory’s The Householder (1963) and Shakespeare-Wallah (1966) but this was his mainstream debut. He certainly has a screen presence and enjoys the best character arc, going from the cynicism of sex to the innocence of love. I’m sure the title is intended to refer to Polly but she is innocent, in screen shorthand terms, for about two seconds. Pretty Polly, the title of the short story on which the film is based, was not usable in certain countries because the name was the trademark of a popular brand of hosiery.
This was the final film of Brenda de Banzie (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956) and the second for British television stalwart Patricia Routledge (Keeping Up Appearances, 1990-1995), while for Chinese star Kalen Liu (Welcome to Hard Times, 1967) it was both her second and last picture.
This was perhaps an odd choice for director Guy Green (A Patch of Blue, 1965) but he was mired in the on-again off-again saga of proposed MGM roadshow epic Forty Days of Musa Dagh and compared to those travails this may have been welcome light relief. Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (Lock Up Your Daughters, 1969) developed the screenplay from Noel Coward’s short story.
Jane Fonda tagged this the worst film of her career but that’s a bit harsh and I suspect it owed a lot to the actress being dressed up Audrey Hepburn-style in outfits that scarcely suited her. While it’s certainly overheated, melodramatic moments indicated by thundering music, a marvellous supporting cast, including a quite bitchy Angela Lansbury, provides ample compensation.
It’s romance in the Love Story vein, rich young flighty heroine Christine (Jane Fonda) at death’s door half her life, but feeling smothered by understandably over-protective husband Sam (Arthur Hill). When she falls for married publisher Murray (Peter Finch) and sets off on a trip to Greece, chaperoned it turns out by Murray’s bitter wife Sybil (Angela Lansbury), it takes a while for romance to physically bud. That it does at all is only because Sybil has taken off with suave traveling salesman Leonard (Nigel Davenport).
The movie takes a long time to heat up because, as in The Bramble Bush fashion, there’s overmuch character filling-in to do. Part of the interest in this picture is how the bad guys are effectively good guys, more victims of their partner’s behaviour than anything else, though for story purposes, the audience has to be persuaded otherwise.
So besotted Sam, having dealt with umpteen bouts of his wife’s pneumonia and lung operations, a “slave” to her illnesses, is deemed as treating her like a child rather than a wife, preferring her ill rather than well, and denying her the adventure to which she feels entitled. When she meets Murray she has run away. Murray’s wife has a downer on her husband because, wait for it, he killed her child and left her facially scarred (hidden now by hair but she’s still very sensitive about it) in a car accident he caused.
But she’s portrayed as over-sensitive, worried about her appearance, snippy, blaming him for her distraught life, and worse, a philistine, hating being dragged around ancient Greek monuments. Aware of her husband’s proclivities, she mocks, “You’d be an idiot to fall in love with her.” And any time she ventures out, the music rises to a crescendo as if she is a character straight out of film noir.
When she goes off with Leonard, her love affair is viewed as sneaky rather than redemptive, even though he restores her faith in herself. Triumphantly, she tells Christine, “He’s all yours” and her husband “nobody need feel sorry for me any more.”Admittedly, she does take revenge by informing Christine’s husband, who has entrusted his wife to Murray’s care, of their affair. And you would be hard put to argue, although the film wants you to believe otherwise, that Sybil and Sam have been ill-treated by their partners, Sam, in particular, funding her trip to Greece in the hope that allowing her the freedom she needs will save their marriage.
Of course, the characters of both partners, even if their self-pitying is the result of circumstance, do mean that Christine and Murray are presented as people trapped in bad marriages and for whom love, however brief, provides sanctuary from tortured lives, her physical, his more mental, since he is not averse to guilt.
Sybil’s lack of interest in tourist Greece handily gives the prospective lovers plenty time to fall in love, amid gorgeous scenery, and breathing in air rich in culture. With all film made in the 1960s and set in foreign parts – Pretty Polly (1967) another example – sometimes the story takes second place to the scenery, so it’s lucky that the romance is played out against such an interesting background, an ideal combination, killing two birds with one stone if you like. Given this is prior to Zorba the Greek (1964), the filmmakers have even managed to sneak in some traditional Greek dancing, albeit on the deck of a ferryboat.
Dress-wise, the lovers are ill-matched, Murray plodding around in a suit while Christine parades the latest often clingy fashion. When Sybil departs the scene, that leaves one happy character of the happy couple free of marital encumbrance, but still leaves open the question of how Christine will rid herself of Sam and, more importantly, will Murray wish to take on the all-consuming job of nursing Christine. He never gets the chance to find out. When she does fall ill – as the result of Murray recklessly keeping her out in a thunderstorm – her mother Lily (Valerie Kendrick) swoops in to rush her to hospital.
Spoiler Alert – I’m telling you that she dies because it seems to me that the ending the filmmakers hoped for is not how the audience will perceive it. Beautiful young woman dies too young, yep that’s there, but the man, now free and able to shake off his dull life and start afresh as a writer, seems a long shot. Given he has now, thanks to the thunderstorm episode, killed two people, I would surprised if guilt was not uppermost in his mind.
Not so-good-it’s-bad, and despite the complications, and perhaps because of the Sybil-Leonard romance, it’s certainly an interesting picture as much, perhaps, because it fails to send the audience in the desired direction.
In only her fifth movie, Jane Fonda (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, 1969), exhibiting the nervous friskiness that would become a hallmark, does pretty well with a febrile, spoiled, character. If she falls down at all it’s that she appears uncomfortable wearing Orry Kelly’s fabulous gowns and it would take Hollywood some time to work out she was not a natural successor to Audrey Hepburn. Peter Finch (The Pumpkin Eater, 1964) is perfectly at ease with the illicit.
But Angela Lansbury (Harlow, 1965), a hoot as the wife who turns rejection into triumph, steals the show. Throw in Arthur Hill (Moment to Moment, 1966), Nigel Davenport (Sands of the Kalahari, 1965), for once neither smug nor snippy, Alexander Knox (Khartoum, 1966), veterans Constance Cummings (The Criminal Code, 1930) and Valerie Taylor (Went the Day Well, 1942), John Le Mesurier (The Liquidator, 1965) and Alec McCowan (Frenzy, 1972) and you have a movie where hardly a moment goes by without admiring a performance.
Robert Stevens (I Thank a Fool, 1962) directed from a screenplay by Meade Roberts (Danger Route, 1967) based on the novel by Susan Ertz.
The Magnificent 60s 