Hollywood 90028 (1973)

          Some grungy movies are such prime fodder for cultural analysis that their actual cinematic merits (or lack thereof) are inconsequential—the serious-minded viewer consumes the film as an appetizer for the rhetorical feast. So it is with Hollywood 90028, which at various times has been called The Hollywood Hillside Strangler, Insanity, and Twisted Throats. As those lurid monikers suggest, the folks responsible for selling this picture to an unsuspecting public attempted to brand it a straightforward shocker, when in fact Hollywood 90028 is something very different. At the risk of making this crudely rendered flick sound too grand, Hollywood 90028 is partially the character study of a sociopath and partially a rumination on the link between voyeurism and violence. On good days, Mark (Christopher Augustine) is a soft-spoken cameraman paying his dues by shooting stag films while he dreams of going legit. On bad days, Mark picks up women and strangles them to death. Writer-director Christina Hornisher lacks the skill to properly realize this premise, so most of the film comprises dull passages of Mark wandering around Los Angeles, visiting porn stores, and trying to develop a relationship with Michele (Jeannette Dilger), a stag-film performer who has issues of her own. (Sidenote: The picture’s most believably human moment is the vignette of Mark listening to a phone message from Michele in which she explains her reasons for ending their relationship and then presents music by her sensitive new boyfriend—ouch.)

          To get a sense of how little happens in Hollywood 90028, more than 45 minutes elapse between the first and second kills, and the movie is only 76 minutes long. Yet the picture has four noteworthy elements. First, it’s somewhat rare as a female-directed psychosexual story from the early ‘70s. Second, the leisurely pacing allows viewers to luxuriate in shots of sleazy vintage LA. Third, all that moody piano music on the soundtrack is courtesy of Basil Poledouris, who became a major Hollywood composer in the ’80s and ’90s. Fourth, the final scene of Hollywood 90028 is genuinely arresting, a nasty distillation of metaphorical and thematical concepts the rest of the film struggles to articulate. The content of the final scene won’t be spoiled here, but for those willing to slog through the film’s grimy tedium (ogling nude scenes, meandering dialogue, questionable editing), there are conversations to be had about Hollywood 90028, even though similar chats could just as easily get prompted by better movies exploring related subject matter, from Peeping Tom (1960) to Body Double (1984) to 8mm (1999) and beyond. There is something to be said, however, about using a film from the cinematic gutter as a means of considering the medium’s darker aspects.

Hollywood 90028: FUNKY

Stunt Rock (1978)

          Delivering in a big way on both elements of its title, Stunt Rock is an Australian oddity depicting the adventures of an Aussie stuntman who visits the U.S. and hangs out with members of a flamboyant rock band, so the nearly plotless flick combines wild stunt footage with extensive concert sequences. As the cult-cinema equivalent of background noise, Stunt Rock is palatable because leading man Grant Page does lots of outrageously dangerous things, from climbing the sides of buildings to driving at insane speeds to setting himself on fire, and also because the gimmick of rock band Sorcery is that each of their shows features an onstage battle between good and evil wizards—lots of silly costumes, lots of magic tricks, lots of pyro. The movie also goes heavy into that oh-so-’70s gimmick of split-screen imagery. While I can’t say Stunt Rock held my attention particularly well as an adult viewer, I can’t help but imagine how an American version of the same movie would have blown my preadolescent mind—the notion of Evel Knievel costarring with Kiss sounds indescribably awesome (even though the actual movies Knievel and Kiss made in the ‘70s were indescribably awful). Setting aside enticing “what if” scenarios, Stunt Rock is sufficiently unique to merit attention from the cinematically adventurous. It’s not a good movie by any measure, but it stands alone.
          Page, already a veteran stuntman and TV personality by the time he made this picture, stars as a fictionalized version of himself. The premise is that he travels to America for work on an action-oriented TV show, then spends time with Sorcery since he’s related to one of the band’s members. That’s virtually the entire storyline of Stunt Rock, excepting Page’s interaction with the actress starring in the TV show—frustrated that her most exciting scenes feature stunt doubles, she pressures Page to train her in the art of doing dangerous things safely. To state the obvious, viewers already interested in movie stunts will find that aspect of the movie more compelling than others; unlike the same era’s Hooper (1978) and The Stunt Man (1980), this flick lets stunt footage unfurl without the burden of narrative import, so the vibe is very much ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Similarly, fans of Alice Cooper and Kiss are more likely than others to groove on what Sorcery throws down. The band’s heavy-metal tunes are melodic, but their onstage shtick is goofy. That said, some details in Stunt Rock are memorably weird, for instance the fact that Sorcery’s keyboard player never appears without a mask covering his entire head. What’s more, reading about the making of Stunt Rock reveals that director Brian Trenchard-Smith put the whole thing together—from concept to finished product—in six months, so that explains a lot. At least the Stunt Rock team found time to assemble a spectacular poster—why that key art failed to draw kids into theaters is a mystery.

Stunt Rock: FUNKY

Teenager (1974)

          More admirable for what it attempts than for what it achieves, Teenager is not even remotely the movie suggested by its poster and title. Instead, this is a lurid but fairly serious-minded story about the risks an obsessive low-budget filmmaker takes while trying to capture onscreen realism. On a thematic level, Teenager is something of a precursor to Richard Rush’s outrageous The Stunt Man (1980), even though Teenager was made with a fraction of the cash and skill brought to bear on Rush’s epic. Providing another link between the pictures, Teenager follows the production of a biker flick helmed by a guy who resembles Roger Corman—the low-budget legend who worked alongside Rush in the biker-movie trenches at American International Pictures during the ’60s. As the preceding suggests, the more one knows about the cinema-history context surrounding Teenager, the more intriguing the film becomes. Considered out of context, it is much less appealing.
          The movie opens with Charlie (Joe Warfield) trying to film a car chase while steering a van down a cliffside road, leading to a fatal crash. Then Charlie narrates from beyond the grave, flashing back in time to explain how he met his dramatic fate. The journey begins when Charlie woos a female financier who demands sex in exchange for the $50,000 Charlie needs to shoot an exploitation flick about bikers harassing the residents of a small town. The gimmick is that Charlie doesn’t tell the residents what’s happening because he wants actors to spark “real” trouble for the benefit of Charlie’s camera. Eventually the teenager of the title gets involved when local 16-year-old Carey (Andrea Cagan) latches onto the film crew and starts sleeping with one of the actors. Soon afterward, a brawl inside a general store results in a death that forces Charlie to suspend production. The remainder of Teenager explores how far he’ll go to finish his movie.

          Although director/cowriter Gerald Seth Sindell and his crew generate amateurish-looking imagery, presumably because they were under budget/schedule restraints just like the characters in their movie, the storyline’s implications are sufficiently provocative to sustain a measure of interest. And while the script is not much more polished than the physical production, Sindell’s choice to cast a Corman lookalike in the leading role seems ingenious when viewed retrospectively—Teenager provides a twisted image of what happens when nervy filmmakers disregard danger and propriety while trying to generate exciting footage. Devotees of vintage cinema will find much to savor here, from shots of filmmakers operating Arri-S cameras to a glimpse at the façade of Rollins/Joffe Productions’ LA office, and so on. Yet it’s the thematic stuff that lands with the most impact. What is realism? What entitles artists to disrupt everyday life in order to indulge the creative process? Which sacrifices are justified, and which ones cross lines? Added to this mix are nuances related to the Generation Gap, because the clash between sexually precocious Carey and her uptight father has important narrative consequences.
          To be clear, Sindell’s reach exceeds his grasp in countless ways. The script is artless, the characterizations are serviceable, and the shooting style is so rudimentary that one longs for richer coverage and slicker editing. Moreover, the acting runs a dispiriting gamut from adequate to amateurish. In other words, it’s clear why Sindell’s only subsequent feature credit is the abysmal sex comedy H.O.T.S. (1979). That said, he was onto something here, as suggested by the picture’s alternate title, The Real Thing (also the name of a recurring theme song). It’s not common for a grungy flick centering bikers and jailbait to double as a conversation piece, but for those already fascinated by the topics explored here, there’s a lot worth unpacking.

Teenager: GROOVY

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

          Easily one of the most famous unfinished movies in world-cinema history, Orson Welles’ elusive The Other Side of the Wind—filming for which spanned 1970 to 1976—finally entered public view, more or less, when producer Frank Marshall supervised assembly and post-production of Welles’ decades-old footage, leading to a 2018 debut at the Venice International Film Festival. (Marshall was also part of the original Wind crew.) While not exactly a proper completion of the project, since Welles died in 1985 without finishing so much as a rough cut, the Marshall-supervised approximation of Wind is now available for examination by any cinematic explorer with a Netflix password.

          Though it seems rather crass to discuss this unique artifact in such mundane terms, the question of whether Wind is worth watching depends entirely on who is asking. Those eager to discover some lost addition to Welles’ mainstream canon should pass without a moment’s hesistation. Those willing to burrow into the madness of a guess at the final form of an experimental film made in an improvisational manner by an artist prone to abandoning projects for reasons that confounded his collaborators should have a better idea of what to expect.

          First, the plot, such as it is. John Huston plays J.J. Hannaford, an aging director in the tough-guy mode eager to make a hip new picture full of intense sexual content and youthful angst. One evening, Hannaford assembles his social circle, plus lots of groupies and sycophants, for a work-in-progress screening. Welles shoots the Hannaford scenes with myriad angles, as if everyone at the party has a camera, and he occasionally cuts to more polished footage comprising Hannaford’s picture, the plot of which falls somewhere between cryptic and nonexistent. Sloshing through this soup of intriguing, lofty, and/or pretentious concepts are performances by Peter Bogdanovich, whose character has a twisted apprentice/mentor relationship with Hannfaord (shades of Bogdanovich’s real-life bond with Welles); Susan Strasberg, as a Pauline Kael-esque critic; Norman Foster, as a has-been actor reduced to serving as Hannfaord’s errand boy; and Oja Kodar, Welles’ real-life mistress, as the actress who stars in Hannford’s movie.

          As should be apparent by now, this is a whole lot to process, especially since Welles largely eschews conventional plotting mechanisms, forcing viewers to piece the “plot” together. It’s relatively easy to follow the broad strokes, but tracking subplots and the interrelationships of supporting characters is quite challenging. The Other Side of the Wind is so overstuffed that it’s hard for the viewer to separate what the film is trying to be from what the film actually is—the piece demands but only occasionally rewards close scrutiny.

          Every so often, a random character will drop a great line, as when someone explains to Hannaford that several acolytes fled: “Five of our best biographers just went over to Preminger!” Just as intermittently, the film locks into a spellbinding stretch—best of all, perhaps, is a long erotic sequence from the film within a film, permeated with so many psychedelic visual effects that it’s both a full-on freakout and a study in meticulous technique. The relationship between the Huston and Bogdanovich characters is poignant and weird, rendered effectively by both actor/directors. (One almost wishes Welles nixed his overbearing visual gimmickry during the characters’ sad falling-out scene.)

          Situated dead center in this whole bizarre enterprise is Kodar, who never delivers a line of dialogue and frequently performs without the encumberance of garments. Not only is there something unseemly about Welles crafting arty nude shots of his decades-younger girlfriend, but Kodar is not an especially compelling presence. Her centrality thus provides an apt metaphor representing the way in which Welles misdirected his attentions. His innate talents are evident throughout The Other Side of the Wind, but artistic discipline is wholly absent. In one scene, studio boss Max (Geoffrey Land) views some of Hannaford’s footage, then asks Billy—the errand boy played by Foster—what happens next. Billy’s sheepish reply? “I’m not really sure, Max.” And so it goes throughout this only fleetingly exhilarating glimpse into Welles’ voluptuous creativity.

          FYI, Netflix commissioned a feature-length documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, about the making of Welles’ movie. Although it leaves many key mysteries unsolved, the imaginatively assembled doc is essential viewing after experiencing The Other Side of the Wind.

The Other Side of the Wind: FUNKY

Boogievision (1977)

Despite marketing materials suggesting similarities to The Groove Tube (1974), Boogievision is actually a counterculture story about independent filmmaking, although it does features a few fake commercials. Struggling director Mick (Michael Laibson) discovers that his girlfriend’s dad, Burt (Bert Belant), is a producer, so Mick submits a script. Turns out Burt makes porn, so he hires the young filmmaker to crank out a skin flick. Mick rebelliously spends Burt’s money to make a politicized sci-fi freakout (with lots of nudie shots) called Lizard Women from Outer Space, and Burt is aghast when he discovers what happened. There’s no use fretting that Boogievision writer-director James Bryan botched his main story, which could have worked if it had fleshed-out characters, because delivering a straightforward narrative is clearly not what Bryan was after. Echoing the behavior of his main character, Bryan was all about, like, doing his own thing, man. Thus Boogievision meanders through pointless discursions and shapeless conversations, gradually drifting more and more toward unhinged druggy nonsense, only occasionally reverting to linear plotting. As for the caliber of the Bryan’s comedy, fake commercials in Boogievision include a trailer for The Excrementists, a scatological riff on The Exorcist (1973), and the film-within-a-film features political rhetoric from “The Radical Feminoids” as well as a chat with a lizard woman (meaning a topless starlet wearing a cheap-looking mask), who is upset about the commercialization of reptile hides. Viewed in tandem with the right controlled substances, maybe this stuff was amusing back in the day. Viewed sober in 2018, not so much.

Boogievision: LAME

Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell (1977)

          If you want a conscientious examination of Howard Hughes’ early adventures in Hollywood, read no further. This tawdry biopic, released to capitalize on public interest after Hughes’ death in 1976, transforms the making of Hughes’ notorious war epic Hell’s Angels (1930) into something out of Penthouse Letters. Once Hughes (Victor Holchak) gets an eyeful of buxom starlet Jean Harlow (Lindsay Bloom), he makes a bet that if he can transform her from a bit player to a movie star, she’ll sleep with him. What ensues is a feature-length flirtation driven by vulgar banter and sensationalistic events. (For example, Jean rubs ice on her nipples before shooting a scene in order to get a reaction from a lifeless costar.) As co-written and directed by B-movie guy Larry Buchanan, Hughes and Harlow offers caricatures instead of people, cheap gags instead of situations, and weak attempts at salt-of-the-earth wit instead of real dialogue. That the picture is mostly watchable can be attributed to the traffic-accident appeal of the real history being depicted, and also to Bloom’s zesty performance as a woman who’s seen it all but still wants to believe in something better.

          The picture begins with the premiere of Hell’s Angels, during which Howard and Jean fret about the reactions of the audience and those of Hollywood censor Will Hays (Royal Dano). Then Hughes and Harlow flashes back to episodes from the making of Hell’s Angels. When Jean first meets Texas oil heir Howard, he’s already sunk $2 million into his movie and churned through directors. Once he assumes helming chores himself, Howard identifies Jean as a possible female lead, even though she moonlights as a hostess in a brothel. Naturally, Jean assumes the offer comes with strings, but instead Howard makes the salacious bet. Throughout a production cycle fraught with difficulty, the two run hot and cold with each other. They also share their deepest ambitions and fears. In a typically clunky line of dialogue, Howard opines: “We’re both just a couple of a country kids trying to make it in this hellhole of Hollywood.” Jean Harlow and Howard Hughes, avatars of morality in a cesspool? Whatever you say, Mr. Buchanan.

          The film’s most entertaining scenes feel like renderings of apocryphal stories, as when Howard berates veteran filmmaker Howard Hawks (Adam Roarke) for poaching stunt performers. Other vignettes work simply because Bloom, who enjoyed an undistinguished career in B-movies and TV shows, channels cynicism so effectively. (As a curvy blonde in ’70s Hollywood, one imagines that Bloom had plenty of life experience to use as inspiration for her performance.) Holchak, who also worked extensively in TV, looks the part and has a few sincere moments, but let’s just say his portrayal of Hughes is not definitive. Ultimately, how palatable you’ll find this picture depends on your appetite for showbiz lore, because Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell is a tacky rendering of a compelling story.

Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell: FUNKY

Savage Intruder (1970)

Released toward the end of the “hagsploitation” cycle that began with Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), this shabby horror flick uses the familiar device of a deranged ex-movie star living out a twisted retirement in a Hollywood mansion, so any resemblance to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is purely intentional. Suffice to say this flick falls well short of Wilder’s masterpiece—and even Aldrich’s camp classic. Cheap, discombobulated, and tacky, Savage intruder can’t decide whether it’s a blood-and-guts shocker, a bummer melodrama, or a hip commentary on showbiz. The gist is that fallen star Katharine Packard (Miriam Hopkins) suffers delusions of resuming her career, even as a killer stalks the Hollywood hills, targeting middle-aged women. Enter Vic Valance (John David Garfield), a slick-talking stud who becomes part of Katherine’s household staff. Naturally, he’s the killer, so the ending is a foregone conclusion. In lieu of mystery, the movie has weirdness, both in terms of over-the-top dismemberment scenes and psyched-out sequences. Vic endures surreal flashback/hallucination bits, all gauzy compositions and harlequin-patterned tunnels. As for poor Katharine, she ends up at debauched parties. During one, she’s approached by a drug-dealing dwarf whom she brushes off by saying, “No thank you—the only trips I take are to Europe.” Lest you get the idea she’s an innocent, Katherine gets drunk while participating in the Hollywood Christmas Parade, lamenting that Hollywood Boulevard was preferable before “all these hoodlums and queers” arrived. Although Savage Intruder is not scary, some viewers might get a mild buzz by huffing the movie’s derivative campiness.

Savage Intruder: LAME

1980 Week: Home Movies

Brian De Palma took a break from his successful career as a Hollywood director to teach filmmaking at Sarah Lawrence College, where he’d done graduate work in theater, and this project resulted from student exercises. Despite the involvement of marquee names including Kirk Douglas, who has a small recurring role, the smart move would have been to let Home Movies linger in the relative obscurity of academia, because it’s an embarrassment. Not only is Home Movies amateurish and silly, but it’s suffused with crass elements including scenes during which the white leading character wears blackface as a disguise. Credited to seven writers, including De Palma, the narrative follows Denis Byrd (Keith Gordon), a young man who takes a filmmaking course from “The Maestro” (Douglas). Egomaniacal and overbearing, “The Maestro” encourages Denis to use his eccentric family as fodder for a class project, so Denis tracks his philandering father (Vincent Gardenia) and his older brother, James (Gerrit Graham), an insufferable college professor who pummels his fiancée, Kristina (Nancy Allen), with absurd rules about abstinence, diet, and exercise. Somehow this resolves into Denis surreptitiously filming people having sex. The story is coherent, but the events are pointless and random and tacky. James throwing food at Kristina because she broke a rule. Denis rescuing a lingerie-clad Kristina from a rapist. “The Maestro” climbing a tree to shame Denis for doing exactly what “The Maestro” asked, filming real life. Wasted are Allen’s girl-next-door charm, Gardenia’s impeccable comic timing, and Graham’s intense weirdness. Plus, seeing as how De Palma extrapolated many story elements from his own life experiences, the odor of self-indulgence permeates.

Home Movies: LAME

There Is No 13 (1974)

          In the abstract, There Is No 13 sounds like the ultimate lost classic of the New Hollywood era. Made on a limited budget but reflecting both artistic ingenuity and thematic ambition, the picture uses a surrealistic approach to explore the inner life of a soldier traumatized by experiences in Vietnam. The title refers to the soldier’s twelve sex partners, so the phrase “there is no thirteen” indicates his ambivalent feelings toward the future. Will he ever know love again? Has war ruined him for civilian life? Did Vietnam drive him insane? Yet, as happens with disappointing frequency when sifting through film history, one discovers upon watching There Is No 13 a massive gulf between the potential of the picture and the picture itself. Writer-director William Sachs, who spent most of his subsequent career making schlocky exploitation films (e.g., 1980’s abysmal sci-fi flick Galaxina), lacks the cinematic skill and intellectual dexterity to render the novelistic picture There Is No 13 so desperately wants to be, a combination of Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

          Instead of making a Grand Statement™ about war, Sachs offers an intermittently distracting compendium of hazily considered vignettes, without anywhere near a sufficient volume of connective tissue. Some moments are funny, some moments are sad, and some moments are weird, but the whole thing feels aimless and episodic. Worse, Sachs indulges in certain tropes that simply don’t work, such as a half-hearted motif featuring close-ups of mouths chewing food. One gets the impression Sachs wanted to skewer American consumerism as long as he was probing beneath the country’s sociocultural skin, but if so, he overreached.

          The figure at the center of the story is George Thomas (Mark Damon), ostensibly a new patient at a military hospital. He hallucinates an alternate (or remembered) reality in which he’s actually a filmmaker applying for work with a production company. In this thread, he considers a job offer to write a sexploitation-flick script, enjoys a tryst with an eccentric rich girl (Margaret Markov), and completes a tryout assignment for a hospital seeking instructional films. (The less said about his magnum opus, How to Fingerprint a Foot, the better.) Bracketing and interrupting this more-or-less linear narrative are weird interludes. A vaudeville-type comedy/music routine in a hospital hallway. A demonstration of the Moog synthesizer system in a barren field. Shots of people wandering through New York City as George’s snotty voiceover dismisses them as “pea-brains” driving “turds” (his nickname for cars).

          There’s a student-film quality to all of this, which makes sense given that There Is No 13 was Sachs’ first directorial effort after having served as a sort of cinematic repairman on previous films, including the acclaimed Joe (1970) and the not-so-acclaimed South of Hell Mountain (1971). Clearly, Sachs had a lot to say—and just as clearly, his desire to express himself exceeded his ability to do so.

There Is No 13: FUNKY

Alice Goodbody (1974)

A grungy sex comedy about a busty young woman sleeping her way to stardom, Alice Goodbody has a few elements that are almost respectable. For instance, the running gags are constructed properly, and some of the inside jokes have bite, such as the implied dig at famed costume designer Edith Head. That said, too many of writer-director Tom Scheuer’s zingers fall flat, leading lady Colleen Brennan’s performance is monotonously dippy, and the whole enterprise is inherently sleazy. One day in a Hollywood diner, chipper Alice (played by porn star Brennan, billed as “Sharon Kelly”) meets Myron (Daniel Kauffman), the “second assistant production manager” on a musical version of Julius Caesar. He offers her a bit part in exchange for a BJ, setting up the central joke that Alice views trading sexual favors as a normal aspect of paying her dues. Even later in the story, after servicing half the crew, she’s still bubbly and friendly. Make your own call whether this is grotesque male fantasy or sly Hollywood satire. Most of the movie comprises sex scenes featuring Alice and eccentric lovers. One guy is a food freak who gets off on sloppy gluttony; another is a narcissist who spends his entire encounter with Alice admiring himself in a mirror. The weirdest scene involves a germaphobe whose pre-coital examination of Alice’s body occasions a POV camera angle from inside her vagina. (It’s not as gross as it sounds, but it’s startling.) The climax of the picture, and the closest Scheuer gets to a real human moment, depicts Alice’s tryst with the movie’s belching, farting, self-loathing slob of a producer—despite Alice’s best efforts to rouse him, he complains that he’s bored by having been overly entitled for too long. It’s not the deepest of moments, but it’s something. As for the Edith Head bit, one of Alice’s lovers is a lesbian costume designer who buries her face in Alice’s skirt during a fitting. Given how gossip about Sapphic inclinations dogged Head for years, the character suggests Scheuer was a steeped in Hollywood lore. Less defensible is the scene of a woman playing “Oh, Susanna” on harmonica. Instead of her mouth, she uses her genitals to play the instrument.

Alice Goodbody: LAME

Miss Melody Jones (1972)

By definition, the purpose of criticism involves identifying strengths and weaknesses in creative endeavors. Often that leads to positive results, with appraisers lavishing artists with compliments. Sometimes it goes the other way. And every so often, a critic lands in the unfortunate position of having to remark on something like Philomena Nowlin’s performance in the blaxploitation-themed showbiz saga Miss Melody Jones, also known as Ebony Dreams. Before we travel down that path, let’s set the scene. Shot on a meager budget and made with an equally meager amount of imagination, Miss Melody Jones tells the story of an upbeat young woman who makes a living as a stripper in a Los Angeles nightclub while trudging through one humiliating audition after another in search of stardom. She gets comfort and support from her gay roommate and, eventually, a warmhearted paramour with his own cinematic ambitions, but life is unkind to Miss Melody Jones. At her lowest, she takes an acting role as a gang-rape victim in a nudie flick. There’s nothing here viewers haven’t seen a zillion times before, except for the inimitable Philomena Nowlin. A shockingly inept actress, Nowlin screams nearly every line, and she does so in one of the most dissonant voices you will ever encounter. Imagine the sound of a cat that just inhaled helium. Even Fran Drescher would cringe. Yet for some reason, Nowlin was given one long monologue after another, so a good 15 percent of the movie comprises nothing but a bug-eyed, hand-flailing Nowlin screeching at top volume. Overall, Miss Melody Jones is innocuous, if a bit threadbare from a narrative perspective. But with regard to the film’s singular leading performance, spare yourself if you value your eardrums and your sanity.

Miss Melody Jones: LAME

Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976)

It’s hard to avoid being salacious when telling the Marilyn Monroe story. She was raped, she posed for nude photos on multiple occasions, she traded sexual favors for career opportunities, and so on. The challenge for those dramatizing her life is to integrate sensational elements tastefully—in other words, to avoid the path taken by bottom-feeding hack Larry Buchanan while making Goodbye, Norma Jean. Starring onetime Hee-Haw honey Misty Rowe, this picture is a compendium of titillating vignettes, as if young Norma Jean Baker spent every waking moment of her life fending off unsolicited advances, then took control of her destiny by becoming the equivalent of prostitute, exchanging sex for screen tests until she finally won a legitimate role. There’s a grain of truth in that version of events, but Buchanan’s storyline is so simplistic and tacky as to be profoundly offensive. A sure sign of how little Buchanan cares about historical accuracy is the fact that Rowe has bright blonde hair throughout the movie, even though Norma Jean spent many of her pre-fame years as a brunette. Yet perhaps the saddest thing about Goodbye, Norma Jean is that it’s relatively watchable. The curvaceous Rowe appears naked in many scenes, and the storyline moves along at a brisk pace as Norma Jean leaves home, builds alliances, and suffers through one casting-couch nightmare after another until making her dreams of stardom come true. Moreover, the public’s enduring fascination with Monroe’s tragic life grants Goodbye, Norma Jean the illusion of relevance. Yet this is unquestionably a sleazefest disguised as a biopic, so even though Goodbye, Norma Jean is competently filmed and has the occasional resonant moment, the picture demonstrates that the indignities Monroe suffered did not end with her death; movies like this one prolong an ugly cycle of objectification and violation.

Goodbye, Norma Jean: LAME

Black Starlet (1974)

          Telling the familiar story of a young woman degraded by the humiliating compromises she makes while pursuing Hollywood stardom, Black Starlet should be a disposable exploitation flick. The budget is low, the cast is unimpressive, and the exploitation quotient is high enough to become bothersome, with gratuitous nudity periodically distracting from the story. Yet Black Starlet meets and nearly exceeds the very low expectations set by its subject matter and title. Star Juanita Brown, who acted in a handful of ’70s drive-in flicks, grows into her role, becoming stronger as her character falls from hopefulness to cynicism. While certainly not a skillful performance, her work is committed enough to put the movie across. Similarly, director Chris Munger and his collaborators put sincere effort into making clichéd characters and scenes feel fresh. Everything in Black Starlet is rote on the conceptual level, from the sleazy agents and producers to the horrific scenes of men demanding sexual favors in exchange for career opportunities, but the way Munger lingers inside scenes—rather than speeding through them—allows a sense of unease to take root.

          Waking up one day next to a man she clearly regrets sleeping with, Clara (Brown) steps to a window and looks out at Los Angeles, then flashes back to events that led to her current situation. In her old life, despite having taken years of acting classes, she was a millworker going through a dull routine with a loser boyfriend prone to bar brawls. After one too many humiliating Saturday nights, she left him and made her way to Hollywood, where she got a job in a dry-cleaning shop while hustling for acting work. Enter Brisco (Eric Mason), a scumbag agent willing to trade his services for sex. He got Clara’s career started, but he also spread the word she was willing to oblige, leading her into the beds of one bottom-feeding producer after another. Ignoring good advice from the few kind souls she encountered in Los Angeles, including business manager Ben (Rockne Tarkington), Clara became “Carla,” a drugged-out, self-loathing, tempestuous diva.

          What makes Black Starlet more or less palatable are the moments wedged between exploitation-flick extremes. An early scene features Clara waiting on a street corner for a bus. After several men stop their cars to solicit her, presuming a black woman alone on the street must be a hooker, a motorcycle cop threatens to arrest her, so Clara jumps into the next man’s car just to get away from the cop. That man steals all of Clara’s money. Lesson learned. Later, in the dry-cleaning shop, Clara endures hectoring from her boss, Sam (Al Lewis), a cigar-chomping putz who refers to all his customers as “slobs” and obsessively yells: “Don’t press above the crotch!” Individually, each of these scenes is serviceable, but cumulatively, they give the vapid storyline a foundation in human reality.

Black Starlet: FUNKY

1980 Week: Stardust Memories

          Woody Allen’s myriad remarks over the years that Stardust Memories is not an autobiographical movie are at least slightly disingenuous, the understandable backpedaling of a popular artist who was perceived as slighting his fan base. After all, Allen plays Sandy Bates, a neurotic comedy-movie auteur enduring an existential crisis after audiences turn on him for experimenting with drama. Any resemblance to Allen, who followed the crowd-pleasing Annie Hall (1976) with the dour chamber piece Interiors (1977), is purely coincidental. Yeah, right. Allen’s disclaimers notwithstanding, Stardust Memories is an extraordinary exercise in public self-examination. Questioning the purpose of filmmaking and the value of humor in world seemingly zooming toward destruction, Stardust Memories skillfully integrates jokes, melodrama, romance, and what might be called spirituality. (One must tread lightly there, given Allen’s endless proclamations of atheism.)

          Even the rapturous black-and-white images of Stardust Memories have a metatextual kick, since audiences embraced the monochromatic cinematography of Allen’s previous film, Manhattan (1979), broadly seen as his return to comedic form following the failure of Interiors. Like so many other things in Stardust Memories, the repetition of a trope from a prior film defines Allen as an artist not only willing but eager to wrestle with the potentialities of tropes by applying them to varying forms of subject matter. If black-and-white images mean such-and-such in X context, what do they mean in Y context? It’s all about digging deeper and asking more problematic questions. Whereas Allen’s beloved “early, funny” movies mostly eschew cinematic style in favor of gags and narrative speed, Stardust Memories represents the apex of an evolution that began with Annie Hall. While life itself is ultimately Allen’s main subject, with Stardust Memories he fully integrates the complications of his own reputation into his repertoire, and he does so at the very same career moment when he assumes full command of cinema as a storytelling medium.

          While all this critical-studies significance is a lot of weight to drop onto Stardust Memories’ shoulders, the movie can bear the burden.
          Filled with insights and ruminations and witticisms, it’s a singularly alive piece of filmmaking. Once again, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis create striking imagery, and once again, Allen pulls terrific work from an eclectic cast. (Watch for Sharon Stone, making her movie debut, in the opening scene.) Presented in a somewhat freeform style with more than a few touches of classic European arthouse cinema, Stardust Memories explores the fictional Sandy Bates’ life from myriad perspectives. Even as he juggles romances with challenging Daisy (Jessica Harper) and comforting Isobel (Marie-Christine Berrault), Sandy contemplates ghosts from his relationship with a troubled woman named Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling). More pointedly—since Allen spun a similar romantic web in Manhattan—the Sandy character allows Allen to ask what audiences expect from him, and why audiences resist change in his persona. In the picture’s most famous scene, aliens from outer space remind Sandy that his greatest gift is being able to make people laugh, and that humor may well contribute more to the human experience than Bergman-esque ennui.

          Left unresolved, of course, is the question of whether Sandy (or Allen, for that matter) can reconcile his clashing artistic impulses. Witness the incredible highs and lows of Allen’s subsequent output, wherein he has tried to merge what he does well with what he simply wants to do well. Like Bob Fosse’s extraordinary All That Jazz (1979), Stardust Memories is part performance review and part psychoanalysis. Not everything in Stardust Memories works, since Allen periodically succumbs to the very pretentiousness that disgruntled fans perceived in Interiors, but Stardust Memories is an essential chapter of the Woody Allen story. It’s also among the nerviest statements a popular American artist has ever made, a declaration of independence from expectations and preconceptions.

Stardust Memories: GROOVY

A Labor of Love (1976)

          Analyzing the documentary A Labor of Love is a tricky business. Brief but focused and interesting, it’s a movie about movies, tracking production of a low-budget indie called The Last Affair that was made in Chicago, and the documentarians capture elements of artistic obstacles, cast misbehavior, financial pressure, sudden production problems, and the tedium of creating films one camera angle at a time. None of that, however, suggests the film’s main hook and the reason why it’s so complicated to discuss. Prior to principal photography on The Last Affair, backers told director Henri Charr to include hardcore sex scenes or else kiss his budget goodbye—so by the time documentarians Robert Flaxman and Daniel Goldman began filming life on the set of The Last Affair, they had become journalists tracking the creation of pornography.

          This turn of events created two problems, both intermingled with aesthetic and social considerations. Firstly, because A Labor of Love concerns a “real” movie that morphed into porn, A Labor of Love isn’t truly a documentary about the “porn chic” movement that thrived during the early ’70s. There’s a big difference between this film’s squirm-inducing scenes of uninhibited men and women screwing on camera and, say, fly-on-the-wall coverage of professional adult-film stars grinding away on a soundstage in Southern California. A Labor of Love illustrates the surreal working conditions of porn sets without saying anything about the porn industry. Secondly, the documentarians cross enough lines of decorum and good taste to become pornographers themselves. During its theatrical release, A Labor of Love carried an X-rating because it features countless closeups of female genitalia, as well as male-gaze favorites including female masturbation and attractive women receiving oral sex. Yet there’s barely more than a fleeting glimpse of male frontal nudity, suggesting the documentarians felt the true value of their work wasn’t satisfying intellectual curiosity, but rather inspiring hard-ons.

          The most frustrating thing about A Labor of Love is that it’s made well. The on-set footage is steady and vivid, no easy feat given all the chaos and varying lighting patterns of an active film set, and the sit-down interviews are revelatory, with Charr discussing his anguish about the porn requirements and actresses sharing regret after filming exploitive scenes. Parsing the respectable documentary buried inside the skin show, the best moments involve a hopped-up stud failing to rouse—necessitating the use of a stand-in—and the use of liquid soap to create a skeevy cinematic illusion. Although A Labor of Love lacks all sorts of important context, including postmortem interviews exploring what happened with The Last Affair, it conveys some truth, as when a crew member remarks that filming coitus is like making an industrial film, all numbing repetition. Heavy on the labor, light on the love.

A Labor of Love: FUNKY

The Manipulator (1971)

          It’s hard to decide which image best encapsulates the weirdness of The Manipulator, a thriller with Mickey Rooney as a psychopathic movie professional holding a woman hostage in a warehouse and pretending she’s the star of a movie he’s directing. One contender is the long sequence of Rooney dressed as Cyrano de Bergerac, complete with plumed hat and prosthetic nose, while he spews reams of faux-poetic dialogue. Another possibility is the shot of Rooney rocking back and forth in a chair, his eyes bulging in madness, as he screams the lyrics of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Yet perhaps the winner is the scene in which Rooney slathers his face with garish harlot makeup, sweeps his wispy hair into a Caesar style, and minces his way through a verbal affectation so stereotypical it would give Paul Lynde pause. Clearly imagined as a tour de force, The Manipulator instead comes across as a tour de farce.

          It’s not as if Rooney was incapable of good work in the later years of his career, even though his eccentricities often overshadowed the charm that made him one of America’s biggest stars during the 1930s and 1940s; one need only revisit his performance in, say, the TV movie Bill (1981). Yet it seems late-period Rooney needed strong directors to keep him under control, and he’s allowed to run wild in The Manipulator. To be clear, The Manipulator—sometimes known as B.J. Lang Presents—was never destined for greatness. It’s a claustrophobic and far-fetched lark with an inherently repetitive storyline, essentially a one-man show that doesn’t go anywhere.

         Nonetheless, actors live for these kinds of opportunities, since being the primary focus of an entire movie allows for rare levels of multidimensional characterization. Alas, that doesn’t happen here. Rooney’s character is loopy from beginning to end. Plus, to be blunt, playing crazy actually lowers the degree of difficulty for flamboyant performers—any random thing they do is permissible. The challenge in a role like this one is going deep and small, but Rooney does the opposite, despite fleeting moments that convey a peculiar sort of vulnerability.

          In any event, the story is laughably threadbare. We never see B.J. Lang (Rooney) kidnap Carlotta (Luana Anders), and we never learn how he came into possession of a warehouse filled with movie equipment. Myriad scenes comprise tight closeups of Rooney screaming at the camera. Similarly, many scenes feature Fellini-esque dream imagery—naked people dancing, grotesque partygoers participating in orgies, and so on. Unpleasant flourishes juice the images, whether visual (e.g., strobe lights) or aural (e.g., discordant electronic bleeps). Accordingly, the tone is all over the place. Much of The Manipulator is designed to horrify, but some scenes drift into broad comedy, like the where-the-hell-did-that-come-from bit of Rooney doing a Chaplinesque dance within sped-up camerawork. The sum effect is as perplexing as it is wearying. Anders’ nonexistent acting range doesn’t help, and neither does the disappointment of watching the fine actor Kennan Wynn enter and exit the film so briefly and so pointlessly.

          On some level, The Manipulator is fascinating simply because Rooney displays so many wild colors, and there’s a kernel of satirical edge to the premise, which echoes Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950). Mostly, however, The Manipulator is 85 minutes of sadism and screaming and strangeness. 

The Manipulator: FREAKY