Not a Pretty Picture (1976)

          Before launching her long career as a director of mainstream comedies and dramas for both film and television with the 1983 teen romance Valley Girl, Martha Coolidge mixed documentary and fiction techniques for her feature debut Not a Pretty Picture, a cinematic meditation on Coolidge’s experience as a victim of sexual assault. (Long available only on the fringes of the marketplace, the film received a posh Criterion release in 2024.) This is bracing work with enduring relevance—one of the movie’s first conversations involves women saying “me too” while sharing their stories. In some ways, Not a Pretty Picture provides even more fulsome discourse on sexual assault than is present in today’s comparatively enlightened climate, simply because the actor tasked with portraying the rapist offers a perspective on male sexual impulses that would get a man cancelled today. His honesty reflects the ethos of the project.
          Not a Pretty Picture is divided almost equally between dramatic re-creations of Coolidge’s high-school years and behind-the-scenes footage of Coolidge rehearsing her actors. The most ingenious aspect of the film’s structure is that the actual assault is never shown. Additionally, the moments immediately preceding and following the assault are presented only as rehearsal footage, rather than staged scenes. Coolidge has said she wanted the ability to interrupt the assault sequence so she could rap with her actors about their feelings. Michele Manenti, who plays 16-year-old Martha, was also raped in high school, so her ability to compartmentalize her emotions while acting is extraordinary. Meanwhile, Jim Carrington, who plays the rapist but was in real life a longtime friend of Manenti’s, talks about how the male adolescent’s drive for conquest (combined with the pervasive fallacy that all women secretly desire forceful sex) renders the male adolescent blind to moral implications when things get heated.
         Not a Pretty Picture doesn’t achieve everything it attempts. The staged scenes are credible but stilted, and the inexperience of the performers is apparent when they read scripted dialogue (less so when they improvise). Coolidge appears onscreen throughout the rehearsal scenes, so it’s both distracting and fascinating to guess at her thought process while events unfold—she mostly lets the film speak for her, though powerful exchanges about agency and guilt happen between Coolidge and Manenti. The movie also doesn’t have much of an ending—hardly a design flaw, since Not a Pretty Picture was engineered to spark conversations, but the lack of resolution is awkward. Viewed critically, the movie comes across as a rough draft for some more polished effort that never materialized. Viewed empathetically, it’s a deeply personal statement in which a filmmaker uses her chosen medium to explore a traumatic experience.

Not a Pretty Picture: GROOVY

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

          While I’m a reasonably adventurous cinefile, the reputation and running time of Chantal Ackerman’s acclaimed character study Jeanne Dielman kept it near the bottom of my to-view list for decades—I was challenged to muster enthusiasm for a 3.5-hour picture comprising extraordinarily long takes of mundane activities. Even when Jeanne Dielman was named the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound in 2022 (more on that later), the movie seemed as if it would be a slog to watch. Now that I can finally report back from the other end of Jeanne Dielman’s 201 minutes, of course I understand that being a slog to watch is part of the picture’s design. It’s open to debate whether the film’s abnormal length was the best way achieve her goals, but clearly Ackerman wanted viewers to feel as numbed by repetition as the leading character does. Accordingly, the key question is whether the movie rewards viewers’ time. I believe the answer is yes, though perhaps not to the degree implied by Jeanne Dielman’s placement on the Sight and Sound list.
          For those unfamiliar with the picture, it depicts three days in the life of fortysomething widow Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), who lives with her young-adult son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), in a Brussels apartment. Jeanne supports the household with sex work, receiving one client per day as part of a highly regimented routine. Up each morning to prepare breakfast and send Syvlain off to school; cleaning, errands, and meal preparation interspersed with occasional childcare for a neighbor’s infant; then evenings spent serving dinner and helping Sylvain with schoolwork, even though he’s so absorbed in reading that he barely communicates with his mother. (The boy’s age and grade level is never stated, but he’s either a high-schooler or a college student.) Jeanne Dielman is as rigidly structured as the title character’s lifestyle, with chapter breaks identifying transitions between days, and the glacially paced plot only gets cooking about halfway through the movie, when an unexplained change in Jeanne’s mental state causes her to become dislodged from everyday activities, for instance dropping a spoon or forgetting to close one button on her housecoat. All of this is preamble to a single noteworthy event, which won’t be spoiled here but which retroactively imbues Jeanne Dielman with layers of meaning.

          It should be apparent by now that appraising Ackerman’s movie by conventional standards is pointless—even though the narrative has an ordinary shape, the style is borderline experimental. Ackerman deliberately avoids opportunities to take us into her leading character’s mind, forcing viewers to extract Jeanne’s psychology from her behavior. (The director reportedly coached leading lady Seyrig to constrain her facial expressions.) Viewers get enough information to grasp the contours of Jeanne’s life, but then Ackerman adds the element that makes Jeanne Dielman so challenging—outrageously long takes of activities ranging from the cleaning of dishes to the preparation of meals. Throughout Jeanne Dielman, a static camera watches Seyrig do uninteresting things in their full durations. Presumably the film’s advocates zero in on this aspect as one of the picture’s great strengths, a means of forcing viewers to engage with the grinding tedium of domestic work.

          And then there’s the climax, which provides a bracing commentary on the toll such domestic work, done in the service of men, has on women.
         I’m certain the film’s champions would argue that it must be watched repeatedly in order to appreciate its profundity. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though I acknowledge my willingness to watch comparatively dim-witted entertainment films over and over again compares poorly with my reluctance to spend another 201 minutes with Jeanne. Nonetheless, I feel confident that I took much of what the film has to offer from one viewing. Jeanne Dielman is, in its idiosyncratic and unwieldy fashion, both a crisp statement and a potent conversation piece. But could it possibly be the greatest film of all time, as the contributors to Sight and Sound’s list determined? No. It is difficult to perceive that designation as anything other than a rebuttal to decades of male-dominated cinema discourse. However, exalting Jeanne Dielman over enduring films directed by men could also be seen as an amplification of Jeanne Dielman’s message—in a patriarchal society, a woman has to make a hell of a noise to get heard.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: GROOVY

Memory of Us (1974)

          The quintessential figure of a woman who has everything and yet has nothing, Betty (Ellen Geer) is a housewife with a successful husband, Brad (Jon Cypher), healthy kids, and a spacious home. Alas, Betty knows that Brad has a mistress, which makes Betty feel so unmoored that she rents a hotel room in which she can privately explore hobbies, such as photography. It’s Betty’s way of starting a new life without destroying her old one. Meanwhile, voicever reveals what’s going through Betty’s mind, such as questions she wishes she could ask her husband: “Why can’t we look at each other anymore? Why can’t we be tender? Do you tell as many lies to me as I do to you?” All of this should indicate the overly earnest vibe of Memory of Us, a low-budget character study starring and written by Ellen Geer, daughter of familiar movie/TV actor Will Geer. Although Memory of Us speaks to issues that were important in the mid-’70s zeitgeist, such as shifting family dynamics during the time of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, the movie is so plainspoken and unambitious that it feels like a slight telefilm rather than a theatrical feature.

          One problem is that while Ellen Geer is unquestionably a serious actress, she lacks magnetism. Another problem is the aforementioned voiceover, which functions as a narrative crutch—rather than providing insights that viewers wouldn’t be able to glean from dramatic context, the voiceover affirms things viewers already know, thereby giving the whole enterprise a plodding quality. Only two elements of the storyline have any real inventiveness. The business of renting a hotel room as a private getaway lends metaphorical interest, and a sequence in which Betty hires a hitchhiker to pose as her lover suggests dangerous possibilities. Predictably, however, those possibilities never lead to anything. And that’s the biggest problem with this well-meaning but wholly forgettable movie—the storyline is forever on the verge of going somewhere powerful, but it always pumps the brakes before things get heavy. To paraphrase the title of another women’s picture released the same year, Memory of Us might as well have been titled Betty Is Thinking of Not Living Here Anymore.

          Incidentally, Memory of Us was the second Ellen Geer-scripted feature issued by small-time distributor Cinema Financial in 1974—the family film Silence, with Will Geer in the leading role, came out a month earlier. To date, these are the only two films Ellen Geer has written.

Memory of Us: FUNKY

The Blue Hour (1971)

It’s not fun to bag on The Blue Hour, because it represents a fairly serious attempt to expand cinema language while probing the emotional life of a disturbed young woman. The film’s directors, Sergei Goncharoff and Ron Nicholas, use fragmented editing to dislodge the viewer’s sense of time and place, and they intercut different events to suggest psychological correlations. None of this was new in 1971, by which point the French New Wave had already influenced many American filmmakers, but Goncharoff and Nicholas go way beyond flashy jump cuts. Unfortunately, The Blue Hour not only murky but also laughably pretentious: When the title appears onscreen, it’s accompanied by a French translation, L’Heure Bleu. Really, guys? Really? Oh, and there’s something else readers should know about The Blue Hour. It’s an X-rated skin flick. Yes, for all of the directors’ high-minded cinematic technique, the main selling points of The Blue Hour are softcore humping and a whole lot of female nudity. While screwing her boyfriend on a beach, buxom Tanya (Anne Chapman) freaks out by imagining (or hallucinating or remembering) a corpse. Then, over the course of long therapy-like conversations, she examines her difficult sexual past. While living in Greece, she was nearly raped by an uncle and then drove a young priest mad with lust. Later, she worked as a nude model, and clients sexually assaulted her. It’s all very heavy stuff, though the desired sense of portent is diminished by Chapman’s silly performance and by the directors’ tendency to aimlessly probe her body with their cameras. FYI, those who soldier through all 83 minutes of this strange picture will be startled to encounter future WKRP in Cincinnati costar Gordon Jump in one scene—fully clothed, thankfully.

The Blue Hour: LAME

Ash Wednesday (1973)

          Had anyone but Elizabeth Taylor played the lead in this enervated melodrama, it would be completely uninteresting. As is, the minor appeal of Ash Wednesday stems from the way a generation of moviegoers fell in love with Taylor as a child actress, devoured reports of her scandal-sheet lifestyle, and watched with unending curiosity as she evolved from a breathtaking beauty to a merely attractive woman of a certain age. Many of Taylor’s films in the late ’60s and early ’70s concern women struggling to remain sexually vital in their middle years, none more so than Ash Wednesday, which revolves around a woman who gets a facelift in order to win back her unfaithful husband’s affection. Accordingly, those who decode this film for parallels to Taylor’s offscreen personas will find it mildly intriguing. Such was the power of old-fashioned movie stardom. Just as John Wayne fans tolerated substandard movies in order to huff his masculine charisma, so too did Taylor devotees endure hours of aimless Eurotrash just to savor her complicated mixture of fragility and glamour.

          The painfully slow-moving Ash Wednesday opens with Barbara Sawyer (Taylor) visiting a European clinic for a facelift and other cosmetic procedures. Soon, clips from real surgery are shown, so queasy viewers will have to look away. Later, while recuperating, Barbara becomes friends with flamboyant photographer David (Keith Baxter) while awaiting the arrival of her husband, Mark (Henry Fonda). Since she kept her surgery plans secret, all Mark knows is that she’s been on holiday in Europe for several weeks. Unwilling to accept all the obvious clues that her marriage is over, Barbara becomes so lonely awaiting Mark—who delays his arrival several times—that she has an affair of her own, thinking jealousy might shock Mark’s system. Ultimately, the whole storyline is a slow burn to Barbara’s painful reunion with her husband.

          Listing the movie’s shortcomings does not require much effort. The characterizations are thin, the pacing is absurdly dull, and the supporting performances are perfunctory. Furthermore, while we can empathize with Barbara’s anguish, one is hard-pressed to believe that a character played by Elizabeth Taylor at any age has been so starved of romantic attention that she has grown to doubt her own comeliness. (Sure, the deeper reason she gets the surgery is that her self-identity is wrapped up in her marriage, but this isn’t a story about someone getting therapy—it’s about a facelift.) Despite these significant faults, Taylor invests her performance with just enough confusion and pathos to make a few moments feel authentic. Oddly, this is not only one of her most unvarnished performances but also one of her most vain—after all, the real love story here isn’t between Barbara and Mark, but rather between Taylor and her own beauty.

Ash Wednesday: FUNKY

The Dark Side of Tomorrow (1970)

The same year that mainstream Hollywood explored the experiences of gay men in The Boys and the Band, independent producer Harry Novak, a prolific pornographer, issued The Dark Side of Tomorrow, a wannabe-serious look at the experiences of gay women. While the coincidence of timing is noteworthy, the films otherwise share nothing in common. Essentially a skin flick disguised as a social-issue melodrama, The Dark Side of Tomorrow equates homosexuality with immorality, insomuch as the leading characters become reckless philanderers after their first brushes with Sapphic sexuality. Except for the harshly lit nude scenes and a few cultural signifiers (dope-smoking hippies, earth-tone décor, etc.), the picture feels like it comes from the 1950s, and not in a good way. Anyway, Denise (Elizabeth Plum) and Adria (Alisa Courtney) are unhappily married to withholding men, so one day they go to lunch at a happening café and spot two lesbians canoodling. Shocked but titillated, Denise and Adria talk about lesbianism ad nauseam until finally succumbing to curiosity. Bliss ensues. Then Adria becomes a full-on swinger by adding more dudes to her sex life. Adria digs handsome actor Jim (John Aprea), but Denise gets jealous—that is, until she makes out with a random chick on a pool table. Despite the eventful storyline, The Dark Side of Tomorrow is quite dull, thanks to iffy acting, spotty camerawork, and vapid dialogue. It’s hard to take the movie seriously when a depressed Denise walks along a beach—and happens onto a hippie band playing a bummer song inches away from crashing waves. In a more sure-handed movie, that moment  might have played as camp; here, it’s just clumsy and obvious.

The Dark Side of Tomorrow: LAME

The Incredible Sarah (1976)

          Not long after winning two Oscars for Best Actress in quick succession, Glenda Jackson agreed to star in a biopic about Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), often described as one of the greatest actress who ever lived. To be fair, Bernhardt led an eventful life suitable for cinematic treatment, but undoubtedly some folks interpreted Jackson’s assumption of the role as a tacit declaration that she considered herself Bernhardt’s equal or even her superior. Watching The Incredible Sarah today, however, one isn’t struck by any sense of Jackson indulging an artistic ego. Rather, one is struck by the overall mediocrity of the movie. Jackson is excellent, though perhaps not as transformative as one might have expected given the synchronicity between singer and song, metaphorically speaking. However, the film around her is formulaic and pedestrian. Nonetheless, a brisk script, competent supporting performances, and lush production values—in tandem with Jackson’s work—keep the film palatable.

          The Incredible Sarah begins with the title character as a young woman in Paris, making her first audition to the legendary Comédie-Française theater company. Right away, she stands out by reciting prose instead of playing a scene, so she earns a place in the company. Soon afterward, Sarah clashes with the company’s resident diva, Madame Nathalie (Margaret Courtenay), who insists on using blocking and line readings that have been in place for years. Sarah’s desire to reinterpret text leads to an onstage shoving match. And so it goes from there. During Sarah’s early years, her willfulness infuriates small-minded people and inspires true artists. She offends royalty, scandalizes her parents, and generally becomes a notorious figure. She also demonstrates eccentricity by keeping pet monkeys and napping in a coffin. Sarah’s love life proves as tumultuous as her temper proves volcanic, so the dramatic line of the picture involves the question of whether the public can forgive Sarah’s offstage extremes long enough to savor the magic she creates onstage.

          If there was any pointed parallel to be made between Bernhardt’s life and the difficulties of contemporary strong-minded actresses, the makers of The Incredible Sarah failed to recognize the opportunity. At its worst, the movie is a clichéd underdog story reducing Bernhardt to a collection of moods and quirks—even though the clarity of Jackson’s characterization elevates the picture, there’s only so much she can do. It’s an obvious remark to note that Jackson fans will enjoy The Incredible Sarah more than other viewers, so perhaps it’s more useful to note that fans of showbiz stories in general might enjoy the picture, even though it’s shallow and trite.

The Incredible Sarah: FUNKY

Runaway, Runaway (1972)

          Given how attitudes toward the LGBTQI experience have changed for the better in the decades since this movie was made, it seems appropriate to offer two different reviews of Runaway, Runaway, sometimes known by the more succinct title The Runaway. From a 2017 perspective, the picture is problematic because it conveys a “straight is great” perspective. But from a 1972 perspective, the movie seems fairly sensitive. What’s more, I confess affinity for any film in which singular B-movie actor William Smith plays something other than a cretin. He’s only about the third-most-important character here, but he approaches a tricky role gently, adding a welcome nuance of evolved masculinity. To be clear, none of these remarks should suggest that Runaway, Runaway is something other than what it is, a low-budget melodrama with sensationalistic elements. The point is merely that it’s a better and more humane picture than it needed to be, despite trashy advertising materials suggesting something just shy of porn.

          After Ricki (Gilda  Texter) leaves her home in some ghastly Southwestern trash heap of a town, she hitches rides and gets abused and molested until meeting Frank (Smith), an East Coast private investigator traveling to California for work. He empathizes with her desire to find herself, and he never makes a pass at her because Ricki says she’s got a guy waiting for her in Los Angeles. Upon reaching L.A., Ricki searches for her boyfriend and falls in with various hippies until accepting an offer of lodging from Lorri (Rita Murray), a sophisticated prostitute. They embark on a hot-and-cold relationship that culminates with Ricki acquiescing to Lorri’s aggressive come-ons out of curiosity. How the story evolves from there further complicates the movie’s statements about gender identity.

          Writer-director Bickford Otis Webber, who never made another movie—instead embarking on a career as a Hollywood music editor—doesn’t evince any special cinematic skill here. Nonetheless, he approaches elements that might have been sleazy with taste, for instance shooting a scene of Lorri and Ricki frolicking nude on a beach from a distance with a long lens. And while the story’x conclusion hits the aforementioned “straight is great” note in a disturbingly definitive way, Bickford otherwise avoids judgmental rhetoric. So even though this is far too minor a film to merit a place in cinematic history, Runaway, Runaway is refreshingly open-minded in many of its particulars—from a 1972 perspective.

Runaway, Runaway: FUNKY

Jenny (1970)

          Thanks to a one-night stand, small-town girl Jenny is pregnant. Confused and naïve, she moves to New York, hoping to figure things out at some undetermined point in the future. Then she has a meet-cute with Delano, a self-assured filmmaker who makes arty independent projects when he isn’t directing commercials for rent money. Turns out he’s got a problem, too. He’s eligible for the draft, and doesn't much like the idea of dying in Southeast Asia. After they spend some time together, Delano proposes a pragmatic suggestion: marriage. That way, her baby-to-be gets a father with a good income, and Delano gets a chance at persuading the government his domestic obligations preclude military service. Never mind that Delano has a girlfriend and zero romantic interest in sweet, sheltered Jenny. That’s the basic setup for Jenny, a slight but well-observed dramedy starring Marlo Thomas, then at the height of her success in the sitcom That Girl, and Alan Alda, two years before his own sitcom success with M*A*S*H. Both actors imbue their roles with nuance and sensitivity, and the direction and screenplay give them interesting emotional terrain to explore.
          In many ways, Jenny is a respectable character piece touching on weighty social issues. However, the film falls into two easy traps. First, it uses lightheartedness to wriggle out of tricky narrative situations, and second, it cops out with a fashionably ambiguous ending. The most ambitious elements of the picture demand serious treatment for the issues they raise, and the sincere work by the leading actors warrants a proper conclusion. That’s why watching Jenny is as frustrating as it is rewarding.
          Nonetheless, Thomas deepens a potentially simplistic role with real emotion, so we feel her character’s anguish at being used by Delano, even though she entered into the sham marriage fully aware of its parameters. Similarly, Alda does a fine job of playing a heel whose conscience nags at him—Alda sketches the vivid picture of a sophisticate who has difficulty reconciling emotions and intellectualism. Also noteworthy is Vincent Gardenia, who appears as Jenny’s father in a brief but effective sequence. With a few simple moves of behavior and physical carriage, he speaks volumes about the Generation Gap, expressing the pain straight-laced parents felt watching their children experiment with new and untried social structures. There’s much to like here, not least being the imaginative camerawork by director George Bloomfield and cinematographer David L. Quaid. Ultimately, however, Jenny falters by not seeing its premise through.

Jenny: FUNKY

To Find a Man (1972)

          The most intriguing films about teen life avoid oversimplifying young characters, following adolescents through adventures and mishaps as they broaden their worldviews—or don’t. Such is the case with To Find a Man, an offbeat dramedy with the unlikely subject matter of illegal abortion. Making her screen debut, Pamela Sue Martin stars as Rosalind McCarthy, a shallow Catholic schoolgirl who wants to terminate a pregnancy. Hence the title, since the “man” she seeks is not a romantic companion but rather a doctor willing to operate outside the law. Yet Rosalind is only nominally the protagonist, as the story revolves around her best friend, Andy (Darren O’Connor). Their families live near each other in a ritzy Manhattan neighborhood, but even though Andy has developed feelings for Rosalind, he’s never expressed himself. This hidden truth adds yet another layer of emotional weirdness to the situation once Rosalind enlists Andy’s help finding an abortionist. In the film’s best scenes, Andy’s willingness to do anything for Rosalind collides with her inability to behave responsibly. While the film doesn’t overtly slut-shame Rosalind, an understandable sense of bewilderment at her recklessness comes across.

          Based on a novel by S.J. Wilson, To Find a Man was written for the screen by the venerable dramatist Arnold Schulman, whose career includes some spectacular misfires as well as several fine scripts for film and television. He imbues every character in To Find a Man with specificity, from Rosalind’s guy’s-guy father, played by Lloyd Bridges, to a neighborhood druggist, played by Tom Bosley. Yet Schulman achieves his best work where it matters most: Andy and Rosalind. Andy is a bespectacled science nerd who finds the horny blathering of his adolescent pals juvenile, while Rosalind is so spoiled she frets at the prospect of even minor pain. A vivid sketch emerges of two people thrown together by circumstance, challenged by adversity, and changed by their discoveries about each other during the process. It’s a platonic love story of sorts, filled with vivid moments. In one memorable scene, Andy coaches Rosalind through the indelicate matter of providing a urine sample, even as Andy’s savvy housekeeper interrupts several times, sparking comedy-of-errors awkwardness.

          As directed by the reliable Buzz Kulik, To Find a Man strives to balance lighthearted storytelling and serious themes, mostly succeeding in that endeavor. (Some may feel the treatment trivializes the topic of abortion, while others may feel satirical elements don’t go far enough.) In the end, what keeps the piece grounded and interesting is the combination of Schulman’s crisp scripting and the credible performances. Martin does appealingly naturalistic work, incarnating a young woman sure to drive many lovers mad in the future, and O’Connor, who never played another major screen role, is just as good.

To Find a Man: GROOVY

Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975)

          A lovely story about aging, identity, and romance, offbeat telefilm Queen of the Stardust Ballroom features a multidimensional leading performance by Maureen Stapleton, as well as a touching supporting turn from Charles Durning. Both were nominated for Emmys. Tracking the experiences of a woman in late middle age who struggles to build a new life after the death of her husband, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom explores the tender theme of how difficult it is to reconcile the disappointments of life with the desire to live happily, especially when the passage of time creates limitations. The central conceit involves dance, because the widow discovers new joy by visiting a ballroom where old songs provide the soundtrack, so there’s a certain innate elegance to the piece—among other things, the movie revels in the irony that heavyset Durning was light on his feet. Had the filmmakers presented their story without extraneous adornment, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom would have been a near-perfect gem. Alas, the filmmakers elected to make Queen of the Stardust Ballroom into a musical, with characters talk-singing several original tunes by the songwriting team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman. The songs are fine in and of themselves, but they diminish the movie’s verisimilitude instead of adding, as was undoubtedly the intention, to the story’s magic.

          The narrative begins with Bea Asher (Stapleton) losing her husband and beginning a lonely new life in her empty house in the Bronx. Her adult daughter lives in the suburbs, and her adult son relocates to Los Angeles. Determined to stay in the house where she’s lived for decades, Bea opens a junk shop but remains desperately lonely until a friend recommends she visit the Stardust Ballroom. That’s where Bea meets portly mailman Al Green (Durning). They connect through dancing and eventually become a couple, but problems—including judgment from Bea’s relatives—soon challenge their happiness. Through it all, writer Jerome Kass emphasizes the combination of excitement and fear Bea experiences every time she steps outside her comfort zone. Yet Queen of the Stardust Ballroom isn’t some manipulative piece about being young at heart; rather, it’s a bittersweet meditation on finding fulfillment no matter what compromised form it takes.

          Director Sam O’Steen, an Oscar-nominated film editor who helmed a handful of projects for the big and small screens, applies an unobtrusive style to the film’s storytelling, keeping the focus during dramatic scenes on the expressive faces of his actors and letting wide shots during dance scenes display figures gliding across the ballroom floor while lights bounce off the facets of a glitter ball. More than anything, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom is an actors’ piece, with the deep humanity that Stapleton and Durning bring to their roles infusing every scene. As for the songs, some are more jarring than others, though, to the Bergmans’ credit, Stapleton’s first number, “How Could You Do This To Me?”, sets up her character well. The songs are not the film’s best element, but they’re not egregious.

Queen of the Stardust Ballroom: GROOVY

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

Stand Up and Be Counted (1972)

          In what should be a standout moment during the feminism-themed comedy Stand Up and Be Counted, ladies meet for a rap session about their encounters with sexism. Participants include Dr. Joyce Brothers (as herself), future Jeffersons star Isabel Sanford, and a nun. Alas, comedic sparks never fly, because like the rest of this flat-footed studio picture written and directed by men, the scene devolves into oversimplifications and slogans. Progressive-minded producer Mike Frankovich and his collaborators, director Jackie Cooper and screenwriter Bernard Slade, seem as if they perceived the women’s-lib movement as a whimsical fad. To a one, the feminists in this movie are portrayed as shrill whiners whose only real accomplishment is alienating the men in their lives. The picture ends on a fairly hip note, so it’s not quite as dunderheaded an affair as the preceding remarks might suggest. Nonetheless, there’s a reason Stand Up and Be Counted is not remembered as a milestone in Equal Rights Amendment-era propaganda.

          Jacqueline Bisset stars as Sheila, a fashion reporter assigned to do a magazine story on the burgeoning women’s movement. To do so, she flies to her hometown of Denver. (The script pathetically explains Bisset’s English accent by saying she spent time in London.) During the flight, Sheila rekindles her romance with an ex, Elliot (Gary Lockwood). In Denver, Sheila discovers that her mother is part of a “Senior Women’s Liberation” organization, and that her ultra-feminist younger sister, Karen (Lee Purcell), wants to hire a man to impregnate her. Torn between new and old ideas about gender roles, Sheila moves in with Elliot, only to discover he’s a patronizing chauvinist. Other threads involve a housewife rebelling against her domineering husband, and a trophy wife demanding respect for the work she does at her husband’s bra factory.

          Stand Up and Be Counted is one of those bad movies that isn’t really a bad movie. In its clumsy way, the film means well, but problems compound problems. Sheila is a hopelessly passive character, thus draining the movie of momentum, and supporting players deliver livelier work than Bisset, causing her presence to seem ornamental. (She’s simultaneously breathtaking and uninteresting.) Lockwood’s performance is lifeless, Purcell is feisty but underused, and minor turns by comic pros including Hector Elizondo, Steve Lawrence, Loretta Swit, and Nancy Walker offer only fleeting relief from the overall mediocrity. FYI, although Helen Reddy’s anthem “I Am Woman” plays during the closing credits, it was not composed for the picture. After releasing the tune a year before, Reddy re-recorded “I Am Woman” for Stand Up and Be Counted, and the second version became a hit.

Stand Up and Be Counted: FUNKY

Players (1979)

          The rapid decline of model-turned-actress Ali MacGraw’s screen career continued with Players, a misfire produced by her ex-husband, Robert Evans. Having established her inability to deliver emotionally convincing performances in hits (1970’s Love Story) and misses (1978’s Convoy), she attempted the challenging role of a cynical jet-setter whose heart opens when she falls for a younger man. While MacGraw is not as screamingly awful here as she is in some of her other films, she can’t conjure the complexity or heat that any number of her contemporaries could have brought to the role. Which is not to say that if, say, Faye Dunaway or Diane Keaton had been cast in the leading role, Players would have been special. The movie’s problems run too deep. The story, revolving around the MacGraw character’s entanglement with a headstrong tennis player, is clichéd and episodic and tiresome. Worse, MacGraw’s costar, Dean Paul Martin, is even more of a mannequin than MacGraw. So if you want to experience two handsomely photographed hours of tennis scenes interspersed with repetitive and trivial vignettes of attractive people making out and breaking up, then Players is the movie for you. Otherwise, beware.

          Martin, the ill-fated son of beloved entertainer Dean Martin, plays Chris, an American tennis player competing in his first Wimbledon championship match. He’s distracted from his game by flashbacks to his on-again/off-again relationship with Nicole (MacGraw). After meeting in Mexico City, they took up housekeeping in her sprawling villa, even though she was engaged to super-rich European businessman Marco (Maximilian Schell). Adopting Chris as a sort of pet project, Nicole guided his transformation from hustler to professional, connecting him with big-time coach Pancho Gonzales (a real-life former world champion who plays himself). Predictably, a love-versus-money crisis emerged when Chris pushed Nicole to choose between their romance and her comfy future with Marco. And that’s basically the whole story, give or take a few sex scenes and training montages.

          Players is one of those bad movies that feels very much like a good movie, since the slick plotting—by Arnold Schulman, who gets a fancy playwright-style credit after the opening title—gracefully bounces back and forth between flashbacks and present-day scenes. The production values are beyond reproach, with glamorous international locations (including the real Wimbledon court), impressive celebrity cameos (John McEnroe, Liv Ullman, etc.), and marvelous music and photography. Players has everything money can buy, though what it really needs are the things that stem from organic creativity: compelling characters, narrative originality, real emotion. Some may enjoy this movie for its glossy textures, though most will fade long before the picture grinds toward its inconsequential climax. As for MacGraw, she makes a respectable effort here but, unfortunately, she cannot will natural talent into being, The failure of Players was one more humiliating step toward has-been status, a fate only briefly forestalled by some high-profile TV work in the mid-’80s.

Players: FUNKY

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

          The final film of revered Spanish director Luis Buñuel, and also one of his most accessible movies, That Obscure Object of Desire uses several playful storytelling devices while presenting the tale of an older man driven to distraction by his love for a mercurial young woman. Unlike the many May-December movies of the ’60s and ’70s that show middle-aged dudes sharing wisdom with nymphets who open their eyes to new ways of seeing, That Obscure Object of Desire gets after something more, well, obscure. Articulating some of Buñuel’s themes would require giving away the resolution of the story, but in general the picture conveys ideas about class, gender, propriety, and self-image, among many other things. Naturally, Buñuel includes two his favorite tropes, radical politics and surrealism, though they don't render the picture impenetrable, as happened with the director’s previous effort, The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Instead, politics and surrealism function like grace notes, adding ambiguity, complexity, and relevance to a story that’s already rich.

          It should also be noted that Buñuel plays a tricky game by accentuating the breathtaking beauty of two starlets, both of whom play the same role (more on that later). It’s as Buñuel hoped to simultaneously satirize older men who court young ladies and beguile the audience with images of nubile flesh. One can only imagine what feminist critics have discovered while dissecting this picture, which somehow manages to celebrate and demonize women in equal measure.

          The picture begins with a droll vignette. After sophisticated gentleman Mathieu (Fernando Rey) boards a train, comely young Conchita (Carole Bouquet) boards a separate car. Matheiu pays an attendant to kick her off, and then Mathieu dumps a bucket of water on her head. The other passengers in his first-class car express shock at his behavior, so he offers to explain why humiliating the woman was preferable to his first impulse of killing her. Buñuel illustrates Mathieu’s story with extended flashbacks. After encountering Conchita for the first time in his own home, where she served briefly as a maid, Mathieu became obsessed with her, chasing Conchita across Europe, offering money to her mother as a sort of dowry, and eventually persuading Conchita to cohabitate. She drove Mathieu mad by repeatedly offering sexual favors, only to refuse them at the last moment. A final round of indignities led to the episode at the train station.

          Among the many peculiar things about That Obscure Object of Desire is the casting of the Conchita role. For no obvious narrative reason, Bouquet shares the role with the equally alluring Angelina Molina. In any given scene, the audience can’t predict which actress will appear, and sometimes, one actress replaces the other in the same scene, thanks to a convenient exit/entrance maneuver. It’s a typically whimsical touch on Buñuel’s part, forcing the audience to ask questions about identity and perception without providing any fodder for answers. The actresses radiate different types of sexiness, Bouqet icy and Molina sensual, so their collective effect on Rey’s character is more than believable. Still, he’s a tougher nut to crack, part worldly aesthete and part love-addled buffoon. These contradictions make his characterization consistent with Buñuel’s longstanding attitude toward the moneyed class. As to the question of whether That Obscure Object of Desire works, the answer is mostly yes. The movie is mysterious and sly and unpredictable, and the final gotcha moment says something bitterly funny about the ephemeral nature of life—after all the fuss, that’s how it ends? It’s a fitting final statement for Buñuel, frustrating and ridiculous and true all at once.

That Obscure Object of Desire: GROOVY

Gal Young Un (1979)

          The pleasures of Victor Nunez’s rural saga Gal Young Un hide in plain sight. At first glance, the storyline might seem depressing and predictable, with a cocksure young hustler ingratiating himself to a wealthy older woman and then treating her like dirt once they’re married. Since the film is set in the Florida backwoods circa the 1920s, the hustler uses his bride’s resources to set up a thriving moonshine business, meaning that Gal Young Un traffics in familiar images related to bootlegging and stills. Yet that’s all flash—or as close to flash as this understated movie gets. Beyond the noise of the hustler’s boasting and lawbreaking hides the real heart of the story, which is the intimate character study of a woman responding to life’s indignities with pragmatism and resolve. Based on a short story by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, best known for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Yearling (1938), this film is part character study, part morality tale, and part proto-feminist crie de couer.

          While bird-hunting one day in the forest, Trax (David Peck) and a buddy stumble across the cabin occupied by Mattie (Dana Preu), who is nearly twice Trax’s age. They exchange pleasantries, and soon afterward, Trax returns to mooch a meal off the warm and welcoming woman, who seems flattered by the attention of a younger man. Later, Trax happens upon information that Mattie is a widow sitting on the backwoods equivalent of a fortune. He woos her into marriage and starts his business, then spends more and more time away from home while enjoying newfound wealth. Meanwhile, Mattie remains stuck in the cabin, only now she has the added responsibility of overseeing Trax’s still and the disreputable goons he hires to operate the apparatus in his absence. A further insult to Mattie’s status occurs when Trax brings home a young mistress, Elly (J. Smith-Cameron), then leaves again, forcing the women to awkwardly cohabitate.

          On one level, Gal Young Un is the cautionary tale of a man whose silver tongue allows him to reap rewards while avoiding consequences. On a deeper level, it’s the story of a complicated woman who trades loneliness for something different. Accordingly, the picture can be interpreted as a metaphor representing the compromises we all make. In his directing debut, Nunez—who also photographed and edited the movie—demonstrates the gentle humanism that defines his best-known films, including Ruby in Paradise (1993) and Ulee’s Gold (1997). Like those pictures, Gal Young Un is small and soft-spoken, because Nunez is more interested in describing people’s journeys than defining them. By stripping away the usual Hollywood storytelling devices, he fabricates unadorned reality, often letting his camera linger on ambiguous reaction shots that allow viewers to add meaning. Some might find this approach too benign, and, indeed, Gal Young Un is the sort of the picture that can lull the viewer into passivity. Yet for those willing to luxuriate in its handmade textures, right down to the occasionally lapses in camera focus, Gal Young Un is thoroughly compassionate and even, in an unexpected manner, rather sly.

Gal Young Un: GROOVY

Out of Season (1975)

          Even if one ignores the story’s implications of incest, Out of Season is a creepy little number. Cliff Robertson plays an American who visits the seaside British hotel run by his old flame, played by Vanessa Redgrave, then rekindles their affair—even as he sleeps with her adult daughter, played by pouty-mouthed sexpot Susan George. Oh, and more than half the film’s scenes comprise bitter arguments, with the mother and daughter spitting venom at each other while the ex-lovers trade vicious accusations and criticisms. This stuff never quite reaches the level of high art, but Alan Bridges’ stately direction, an intelligent script, and three strong performances give Out of Season a certain dark magnetism. And even though the picture is quite talky, one could do worse than listening to Redgrave and Robertson issuing reams of dialogue. George acquits herself well, compensating for one-dimensional shrillness by raising the movie’s temperature considerably during erotic scenes. It’s not fun to watch three people eviscerate each other, but Out of Season holds the viewer’s attention for nearly all of its 90 moody minutes. As for the film’s provenance, reports differ—some sources indicate that the picture is based on a play, though the credits are vague, and it appears the British dramatist Harold Pinter was at one point set to direct the picture. (He made his cinematic directorial debut with the previous year’s Butley, a similarly cruel film.)

          In any event, Joe (Robertson) shows up one day and surprises Ann (Redgrave), whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. Both were married to other people in the intervening period, and Ann is caught in a nasty cycle of squabbles with her daughter, Joanna (George), who resents living in a tiny town. Watching Ann and Joe fall back in love drives Joanna mad with jealously, so she throws herself at Joe, who’s too much of a drunken, self-involved cad to refuse her. There’s more to the picture than that, but those are the broad strokes, so Out of Season unfolds like a thriller—how far will Joe take his illicit affair with Joanna, and when will Joanna spring her trap by revealing what’s happening to her mother? The story isn’t quite meaty enough to support an entire feature, so the narrative energy flags periodically; Bridges and his collaborators would have done well to add a subplot or two. Taken for what it is, Out of Season gets the job done. Robertson’s macho intensity strikes sparks against Redgrave’s pained coldness, and George plays sexual games with such uninhibited insouciance that she’s simultaneously seductive and unbearable, just the right toxic mixture for the situation. Pity the filmmakers didn’t stick the landing, but so be it.

Out of Season: FUNKY