Alexandra Hay – The Magnificent 60s

How Sweet It Is (1968) ***

You’d have thought by now leading men would be running shy of Debbie Reynolds, aware just how easily she would steal the picture out from under the top-billed star (witness Goodbye Charlie, 1964). But she had producers clamouring for the fizz she brought. Her comic skills, and willingness to entertain slapstick, were matched only by Doris Day. Especially helpful when she’s saddled with a convoluted plot that’s one-third generation gap comedy, one-third If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium and one-third the kind of creative thinking that determines that somehow or other the female star must end up in a brothel. Throw in some flower power, split-screen, stills montage and slow-mo and you’ve covered all the bases.

In this hit-and-miss line-up, by far the most amusing element is that it’s the adults – photographer Grif (James Garner) and wife Jenny (Debbie Reynolds) – who are sex-obsessed, sneaking away at every opportunity for a bit of hanky-panky, trying to avoid the disapproving eyes of their virginal teenage son Davey (Donald Losby).

An odd example of creative license here. Poster designers had decided that red was the color no matter what. In the last section of the movie Debbie Reynolds parades in a blue – not red – bikini and the book on which it is based is called “The Girl in the Turqoise Bikini.” I’m not sure the color of the bikini is that much of a plot point unless it’s to hook readers of the original novel, but it’s mighty strange for the poster people just to change the color.

The narrative determines that Davey joins girlfriend Bootsie (Hilarie Thomson) and her lithe gal pals on a tour of Europe accompanied by Grif who has been commissioned to photograph the trip. Much to Grif’s horror, Jenny decides she’s going to follow them and hires out a swanky pad where the grown-up lovebirds can make a nest at some undetermined point.

The picture quickly loses interest in Grif and the girls, beyond an attractive tour guide making a pass at Grif and of course their bus getting stuck in the mud. Not only is the Jenny segment more intriguing – turns out she’s been conned by Gilbert Tilly (Terry-Thomas) into handing over a thousand bucks for a chalet he’s not entitled to hire out – because she gets romanced in high French style (champagne and flowers in case you’re bursting to know) by legal lothario Philippe (Maurice Ronet) and every now and then finds herself wearing little more than a bikini and sometimes nothing at all.

Takes a heck of a long time for the two stories to dovetail so that Grif can flounce off in a huff, punch the living daylights out of the Frenchman, and give the screenwriter the excuse to plonk Jenny down in a brothel (that part, I have to admit, is neatly done). There’s also some unusual class comedy at the chateau, Philippe initially being mistaken for a butler, then having to bunk down with his servant because (guess what) this mansion has only one main bedroom.

For no apparent reason there’s an odd section at the start. Instead of flying to Europe, they take the ship and for no apparent reason they’re stuck on C-deck with a lip-pursing purser (Paul Lynde) who insists males and females must sleep apart and share cabins with strangers. Slot into the miss department the opening with the old trope of the husband coming home to find his wife in bed with another man, except it’s Davey and the parental lovers are enjoying some afternoon delight, though quite how you can stretch that to Davey taking a carving knife up the stairs beats me.

James Garner is no more convincing a photographer than he was in The Pink Jungle (1968) and he hardly gives Debbie Reynolds a run for her money, as if he doesn’t know how to bring this character to life. Except for excelling at the risqué, and she a willing accomplice, he’s coming over like the straight man to her comedienne. Debbie Reynolds is superb, reactions honed to the bone, throwing herself into the part, undergoing whatever humiliation will snare a laugh.

Garner briefly resurrected his career with Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) before he hit the slide (see the previous Behind the Scenes article) and to my astonishment this signalled pretty much the end of Reynolds’ screen career, nothing for the next decades except What’s the Matter with Helen (1971) and a bit part (as herself) in The Bodyguard (1992). You can hardly blame her for screenwriters not coming up with the right material to take advantage of her supreme comedic gifts. Alexandra Hay (The Model Shop, 1969) is wasted, you might just as well have dabbed her role “the sexy blonde.”

Director Jerry Paris (Never a Dull Moment, 1968) throws everything he can at the screen without much success. Future director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, 1990) and producer Jerry Belson (Fun with Dick and Jane, 1977) in his movie debut formulated the screenplay from the bestseller by Muriel Resnik.

Far from the last comedy hurrah you would have wished for the actress, but all you’re going to get.

Model Shop (1969) ***

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.

Mickey One (1965) ***

Smorgasbord of paranoia, Kafka and the surreal, set in an American netherworld. Cue trampolines, a mime, what these days we’d call installations, a comic without a decent joke, a wrecker’s yard, organic food, catering kitchens. You could call Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) a visionary director just for including some of these aspects. Or you could go for another contemporary word: “random.”

We are pretty used to people being on the run be they innocent of the crime of which they are accused or small-time hoods trying to evade punishment. The notion here is of small-time hood Mickey One (Warren Beatty) fleeing Detroit for Chicago but with no idea for what crime, though the list could include gambling debts and stealing a bigger gangster’s moll.

His situation is spelled out often enough in case you’ve not got the picture. “Hiding from you don’t know who for a crime you don’t know you committed,” remarks girlfriend Jenny (Alexandra Hay). In a particularly Kafkaesque moment, Mickey espouses: “The only thing I know is I’m guilty – of not being innocent.”

Smart with the words but not so smart with the actions. Even though he can just about get by as a kitchen wash-up, he gets sucked back into his former profession of stand-up comedian, hardly the most anonymous of jobs. So he is all angst-on-fire when success in some low dive, keeping clients entertained between strippers, attracts interest from a classier joint which naturally sees marketing the new prospect as part of the deal.

Some of this paranoia might just be in his head were it not for being stalked by car-crunching cranes in the wrecker’s yard, spotlights on stage (though you could point out that’s an occupational hazard) and a silent rag-and-bone man.

It says something for the acting of Warren Beatty (Kaleidoscope, 1966) that this is in any way believable. The fast-living lothario of the opening sequence, with gals and booze aplenty, segues into a bum without missing a beat. His paranoia is consistent and he makes some attempt to find out what the heck he has done to end up this way, though it has to be said there’s no actual evidence of pursuit, just the fear of it, and the notion that he owes somebody maybe twenty grand or that the lass tempted into stripping for him was stepping out of line.

*Pretty good plug from a top critic and an arthouse opening – what else could you ask for?*

His breadline living is realistic, too, hitching a ride on a train, bumming food from a mission, sleeping among bags of rubbish, a world where down-and-outs steal the clothes from the back of other vagrants and his job is scraping leftover food from plates in a cafeteria. And there’s always someone at the scam, his landlady dumping another tenant (Jenny) in his tiny apartment.

Maybe less realistic that club owners are lining up to hire him when there’s nary a laugh in his schtick. The biggest joke is in the casting, some kind of infernal joke on audiences to put the likes of the uber-handsome Beatty through mental and physical torture, albeit that he’s perceived as man of abundant talent and collects with ease women willing to put up with the depressive side of his nature.

The movie doesn’t quite fit the Kafka mold because being on stage represents freedom and nobody in Franz’s world ever had a sniff of that. And you wouldn’t call it a thriller either. And if it’s a homage to the French New Wave you’d have to watch a stack of French pictures from this decade to work out what it’s mimicking.

And it’s not like Penn’s work is always on this kind of edge, he’s not the David Lynch of his generation. Every top director is permitted at least one turkey, and this would have been Penn’s except critics in the 1990s started to give it the old reassessment treatment, Penn being a big enough name from his other works to have a stab at how this fits into his repertoire/oeuvre.

So, far from being an intolerable mess. Doesn’t quite ask the big questions Penn hopes it does. More of a curate’s egg of a picture, some interesting ideas, and an excellent performance from Beatty. Alexandra Hay (Only When I Larf, 1968) was part of the French connection, a Canadian model who had hit it big in Paris, with roles in French pictures and an affair with director Louis Malle. But actually she’s good, not the kind of submissive woman Mickey has perhaps been used to, but thoughtful and capable of challenging his illusions.

Screenwriter Alan Surgal was not prolific, this being his only movie.

Skidoo (1968) *

Hubris can only get you so far. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill. Whatever possessed Otto Preminger (In Harms Way, 1965) to believe he could deliver a contemporary satirical comedy beats me. And it beat him, too.

Despite the comedic input of Jackie Gleason (The Hustler, 1962) and Groucho Marx there’s nary a single laugh, except, sadly, at the director’s expense as he attempts to shine a coruscating light on social mores and instead ends up fluffing his lines. The highlights (!!) are gangster Tony Banks (Jackie Gleason) having a bad trip, his daughter Darlene (Alexandra Hay) falling in with a bunch of hippies and having her body painted, his wife Flo (Carol Channing) trying to seduce another gangster Angie (Frankie Avalon) and some attempted gags at the expense of technology.

There’s even the old one of kids making out beside a parking meter and when busted complaining they are not getting their allotted time. And there’s an ongoing “joke” of Flo tussling with various men for control of the television set through rival remote controls.

The story, if you can call it that, has Tony infiltrating a prison in order to bump off inmate Packard (Mickey Rooney) who plays the stock market, complete with ticker tape, inside. Flo and Darlene, trying to find his whereabouts, end up at Angie’s hi-tech pad. Then all the hippies go back to the family house where Flo washes their hair.

You can imagine where hippies come into all this, making with the hip talk, and trying to set up an alternative world to the Establishment.

*Carol Channing makes her feelings known by donning pirate garb.*

In the style of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) the main attraction are the cameos, Peter Lawford (Ocean’s 11, 1960), John Philip Law (Hurry Sundown, 1967), Burgess Meredith (Rocky, 1976), George Raft (Five Golden Dragons, 1967), Mickey Rooney (24 Hours to Kill, 1965) and Frankie Avalon (The Million Eyes of Sumuru, 1967). But they will all cringe at their participation.

Channing, only just Oscar-nominated for Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) makes the worst career choice of her life, Alexandra Hay (Model Shop, 1969) not far behind, though with less marquee value to play around with.

Every acclaimed director has an off day, taking on a project through poor judgement or, more likely, financial necessity. But Preminger was still a Hollywood high-roller and this just looked like a dose of career suicide.