Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s 9780813549521

Citation preview

Hollywood Reborn

S TA R

★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩

AMERICAN CULTURE / AMERICAN CINEMA

D E C A D E S

Each volume in the series Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema presents original essays analyzing the movie star against the background of contemporary American cultural history. As icon, as mediated personality, and as object of audience fascination and desire, the Hollywood star remains the model for celebrity in modern culture and represents a paradoxical combination of achievement, talent, ability, luck, authenticity, superficiality, and ordinariness. In all of the volumes, stardom is studied as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and industrial contexts that enabled a star to be “discovered,” to be featured in films, to be promoted and publicized, and ultimately to become a recognizable and admired— even sometimes notorious—feature of the cultural landscape. Understanding when, how, and why a star “makes it,” dazzling for a brief moment or enduring across decades, is especially relevant given the ongoing importance of mediated celebrity in an increasingly visualized world. We hope that our approach produces at least some of the surprises and delight for our readers that stars themselves do. ADRIENNE L. McLEAN AND MURRAY POMERANCE SERIES EDITORS

Jennifer Bean, ed., Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s Patrice Petro, ed., Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s Adrienne L. McLean, ed., Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s Sean Griffin, ed., What Dreams Were Made Of: Movie Stars of the 1940s R. Barton Palmer, ed., Larger Than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s Pamela R. Wojcik, ed., New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s James Morrison, ed., Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s Robert Eberwein, ed., Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s Anna Everett, ed., Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s Murray Pomerance, ed., Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s

Hollywood Reborn Movie Stars of the

1970 s ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ EDITED BY

JAMES MORRISON

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS N E W B R U N S W I C K , N E W J E R S E Y, A N D L O N D O N

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA

Hollywood reborn : movie stars of the 1970s / edited by James Morrison. p. cm. — (Star decades : American culture/American cinema) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–4748–0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978–0–8135–4749–7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Morrison, James, 1960 – PN1998.2.H636 2010 791.4302'80922—dc22 [B] 2009025373 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2010 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2010 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

C O N T E N T S ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩

Introduction: Stardom in the 1970s

1

JAMES MORRISON

1

Jane Fonda: From Graylist to A-List

16

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

2

Robert Redford and Warren Beatty: Consensus Stars for a Post-Consensus Age

39

CHRIS CAGLE

3

Al Pacino: From the Mob to the Mineshaft

61

JOE WLODARZ

4

Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields: “New Ways to Look at the Young”

82

CYNTHIA ERB

5

Richard Roundtree: Inventing Shaft

101

JANS WAGER

6

Shelley Winters: Camp, Abjection, and the Aging Star

120

JAMES MORRISON

7

Faye Dunaway: Stardom and Ambivalence

138

THOMAS SCHUR

8

Divine: Toward an “Imperfect” Stardom

158

KARL SCHOONOVER

9

Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave: Performance and the Politics of Singularity

182

NICK DAVIS

10

Donald Sutherland: The Politics and Erotics of Submission

202

JEAN WALTON

In the Wings

226

JAMES MORRISON

Works Cited Contributors Index

233 239 241

Hollywood Reborn

★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩

Introduction Stardom in the 1970s JAMES MORRISON

Most accounts of American cinema in the 1970s define the era as a period of tectonic shift. In his large-scale history of the decade, David A. Cook argues that “the American film industry changed more between 1969 and 1980 than at any other period in its history except, perhaps, for the coming of sound” (Cook 1). The conglomeration of the studios, the dispersal of the mass audience, the widespread loss of confidence in traditional genre structures, the pressures on the industry to adapt its products to new social conditions radically different from those of Hollywood’s classical era—these many factors influencing the seismic shifts in American movies of the seventies are well known, and their consequences widely agreed upon. A brief, chaotic “renaissance” occupied the decade’s first half, characterized by the quasi-independent auteur cinema of new young filmmakers, followed by a reversion to the “blockbuster” mentality in the second half, as “Hollywood’s financial health was restored, and the conglomerate ethic ruled” (Cook 6). By 1969, the studio system was commonly regarded as dead, and conventional wisdom in some quarters viewed the star system as a casualty of its demise. In fact, as Cook demonstrates, the studio system was fundamentally reorganizing, as studio operations shifted the balance of previous decades among production, distribution, and exhibition functions toward an emphasis on distribution. Adapting to the corporate climate of post–World War II America, the major studios persevered and ultimately even flourished, their power arguably reaching an all-time high by the end of the seventies. Something of the same kind could be said of the star system. As the studios shed contract talent throughout the fifties and sixties, stars gained power as free agents. The number of stars in the system decreased significantly from the classical era, just as the number of films produced annually declined consistently throughout the sixties and seventies (Litwak 51). But the overall ratio of film budgets dedicated to performers’ 1

2

JAMES MORRISON

pay increased, as did the salaries themselves (Baumgarten and Leavy 22). Especially at the dawn of the New Hollywood, major film financiers questioned whether stars were effective box-office draws (A. W. Howe, “A Banker Looks at the Picture Business,” Journal of the Motion Picture Producers of America, June 1971, 2–7). Yet record sums accrued to rising and established stars throughout the decade (Robertson 80). In an important sense, the star system became more intricate than in previous decades, expanding horizontally in parallel to the studios’ reorientation, as an influx of agents, personal managers, and entertainment attorneys who engineered careers replaced in-house publicists (McDonald 96–100). Movies of the New Hollywood reflected the popular disillusionment of Vietnam and Watergate by demystifying the legacy of the Old Hollywood, debunking longstanding genres and exposing the mythologies that had previously sustained them. In tandem with this development, the notion of stardom became suspect. As a holdover of the old myths, it seemed to rely by definition on the construction of idealized images, but what most characterizes stardom of the seventies is a provisional rejection of such idealization. Nearly every major star to emerge in the decade defies the familiar norms of beauty, glamour, and traditional masculinity or femininity that stardom itself had done so much to establish. Yet few critics argued that these shifting standards reflected a growing preference for authenticity over the constructed image, despite a wash of rhetoric to that effect, nowhere more abundant than in star discourses of the time. On the contrary, cultural commentators met little resistance when they defined the period as pervasively image-directed, egotistical, and insular, the “Me Decade” (in the phrase of Tom Wolfe), mired in a “culture of narcissism” (in the phrase of Christopher Lasch). Indeed, Daniel J. Boorstin’s claim in 1961 that American culture was increasingly dominated by “the image”—a series of media constructs and pseudo-events successively replacing reality itself—took on an added resonance in the seventies, one that was sounded memorably in Norman Mailer’s bitter remark in 1979 that “image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on” (“Mailer on the ‘70s—Decade of ‘Image, Skin Flicks and Porn,’” U.S. News and World Report, 10 December 1979, 52). Some critics argued that, far from suffering a decline in so openly eschewing its older forms or in competition with new media, movie stardom secured an ever more privileged position. Writing in American Film in June1976, Bruce Cook sets out to explain, as the title of his article asserts, “Why Movie Stars Don’t Become TV Stars (and vice versa)” (58). Cook argues that the emergence of television consolidated the power of movies rather than undermining it, establishing an unbridgeable divide between

INTRODUCTION

3

the two media that inevitably favored the cinema. According to Cook, different viewing conditions dictate that the most “ordinary” individual is conferred mythic status by the scale of the big screen, while the most exotic performer becomes a familiar, comfortable presence in the context of home viewing. In Cook’s view, the aura of cinema as a sought experience outside the home generates a mystique around the star, however that star may seem to refuse it, while the integration of television into the texture of daily life denies that mystique to the TV personality, however he or she may covet it. Cook cites Richard Dreyfuss as just one of the many rising stars of the seventies, lacking such traditional prerequisites of stardom as conventionally handsome looks, who benefits from the “element of the mythic” inherent in cinema’s large scale (59). Although Bruce Cook lists many examples of stars’ failed efforts to move between the media, we know that there has always been much more exchange between film and television than he allows. Moreover, his argument would be clearly outdated following the swift popularization of home video in the early 1980s, after which stardom quickly became part of a more general culture of celebrity. Yet his claim suggests one way of understanding how stardom in the seventies manages simultaneously to demystify and re-mystify itself. A look at the top box-office draws of the seventies does little to suggest shifting conditions of stardom during the decade (Gerstner 42A–43A). Male stars of the Old Hollywood, Paul Newman and John Wayne, top the list in 1970 and 1971, respectively, while newer action stars maintain that position for the rest of the decade: Clint Eastwood in 1971, 1972, and 1979, Sylvester Stallone in 1977, and Burt Reynolds in 1978, with Robert Redford tying Eastwood with three appearances in the top spot, from 1974 to 1976. The only woman to appear frequently is Barbra Streisand from 1972 to 1979, with the exception of 1976. Only three other women appear twice: Goldie Hawn (1972 and 1979), Diane Keaton (1977–1978), and Jane Fonda (1978– 1979). The only other women to appear at all are Julie Andrews (1970), Elizabeth Taylor (1970), Ali McGraw (1971), and perhaps most surprisingly, Tatum O’Neal (1976). The remainder of the chart features older actors like Jack Lemmon (1970), Walter Matthau (1971), and Sean Connery (1971) alongside relative newcomers like Woody Allen (1975–78), Dustin Hoffman (1971–72, 1976, and 1979), Gene Hackman (1972), Jack Nicholson (1974 and 1976), Ryan O’Neal (1973), and John Travolta (1978–79). Only one African American appears, Sidney Poitier, once, and for the last time, in 1970. The blaxploitation cycle of the late sixties and early seventies was part of Hollywood’s bid to redress past racial exclusionism, but it

4

JAMES MORRISON

produced no top-ten stars and had the effect, ultimately, of marginalizing Poitier (see Jans Wager’s discussion of Richard Roundtree in chapter 5). Bruce Lee’s popularity in kung fu films, supported by Warner Bros. studios, was another example of a nonwhite star achieving popularity, but as David A. Cook suggests, Lee was largely marketed to a white audience (267–69). What, then, did change in seventies stardom? The rest of this book provides a range of answers. Here, I sketch some of the broad issues in the era’s shifting configurations of stardom by examining the seventies careers of four representative figures.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Dustin Hoffman and Woody Allen

Dustin Hoffman perfectly represents the type of the seventies star, in both the origins of his film career and its trajectory across the decade. According to form, he began the decade with a youth/counterculture cachet courtesy of his star-making roles in The Graduate (1967) and Midnight Cowboy (1969). His first film of the decade, Little Big Man (1970), reinforced that pedigree; directed by Arthur Penn, a filmmaker with impeccable counterculture credentials due to his work on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man forms something of a trilogy with those films, as a deconstructionist western presenting a darkly comic critique of traditional American mythologies. Hoffman’s role showcased the versatility for which he had been known in his stage work, requiring him to play his character from youth to old age. Like those of most actors who achieve success in the seventies, however, Hoffman’s subsequent roles successively reconcile this counterculture image with the establishment. As Lenny Bruce in Lenny (1974), Hoffman plays a martyr to the cause of establishment oppression, while in All the President’s Men (1976), he plays a reporter exposing presidential malfeasance. Yet Hoffman’s performance as Bruce suggests a strong dimension of personal neurosis underlying the character’s attacks on social conventions, mitigating the film’s critique of the establishment. All the President’s Men, meanwhile, depicts Watergate as an aberrant abuse of power, effectively countered by journalistic heroism, rather than a symptom of systemic political conditions. Indeed, Hoffman actively minimizes the politics of his films in interviews by the middle of the decade. About All the President’s Men, he comments that, rather than a film about Watergate as such, “I hope it’s going to be a newspaper story with Watergate as background” (“Dustin Hoffman,” 19 January 1975, Sunday News, n.p.). By the end of the decade, he is playing a sympathetic “yuppie” coping with single fatherhood in the domestic melodrama Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).

INTRODUCTION

5

This evolution is familiar in the careers of key stars of the decade, with Jack Nicholson providing an interesting parallel case (see David A. Cook 346). Often concurrent with this trajectory was an effort to reconcile the tension between being perceived as an actor and being viewed as a movie star. In a Look profile of Hoffman preceding the release of Midnight Cowboy, director John Schlesinger is quoted as saying he cast Hoffman in the role of Ratso Rizzo “because he is an actor—not a film star” (“The Graduate Turns Bum,” 17 September 1968, 70). The “actor, not a star” disclaimer became a

Dustin Hoffman tackles single fatherhood with young Justin Henry in Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, Columbia Pictures, 1979). Personal collection of James Morrison.

6

JAMES MORRISON

veritable ritual of the early seventies, self-proclaimed by figures such as Al Pacino and Gene Hackman, and attached to many others as well. One might say that a disavowal of one’s own celebrity became a virtual prerequisite to stardom in the New Hollywood. Into the middle of the decade, Hoffman was promoted as an actor of the species “serious.” United Artists’ press release for Lenny prominently cited Hoffman’s work with Lee Strasberg in New York, emphasizing the range of his stage performances in the sixties— as “a hunchbacked Nazi homosexual, an eccentric Russian clerk, and a cockney plumber”—over his previous work in film (Dustin Hoffman file, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California). In the first half of the decade, Hoffman takes roles that exhibit his chameleonic quality, his ability to disappear into a character, from the Indian scout in Little Big Man to the escapee from Devil’s Island in Papillon (1973). By the end of the seventies, Hoffman eschews roles far removed from his own increasingly familiar persona—urban, sensitive but edgy, neurotic yet emotionally resourceful— which inflects all his roles from Marathon Man (1976) on. By the time of Kramer vs. Kramer, not only does Hoffman acknowledge his own hunger for celebrity, but he begins to emphasize the continuity between himself and the characters he plays. In a Cosmopolitan interview with Mel Gussow, for instance, Hoffman confides that he found “emotional identification” in that role (“Dustin Hoffman: Red Hot and Ready for Anything,” June 1979, 268). So clear was this identification between performer and character by 1979 that, when Hoffman played against type in Agatha, his performance was derided as a fatality of perverse miscasting. However minor, that film reveals a final sense in which Hoffman typified the Hollywood star of the seventies, because it resulted in a clash between the actor-producer model of the 1960s, the “indie” model of the early seventies, and the agent-producer model emerging late in the decade and dominant thereafter. In a sense, Hoffman’s career traverses these options. His salary rose from $20,000 on The Graduate to $250,000 on Midnight Cowboy (Harris 423). This warranted his inclusion in First Artists, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. on the model of United Artists created in 1969 to bankroll personal projects of Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, and Barbra Streisand, with Hoffman and Steve McQueen joining soon after (David A. Cook 308). First Artists required the stars to forfeit “front money” and bring in their pet projects for under $3 million in exchange for 25 percent of the gross (Brenner 53). This arrangement did little in practice to encourage the production of “small, personal” films, though it also discouraged overt “vanity” projects, at least until the Streisand film of A Star Is Born (1975). Hoffman’s own production company, Sweetwall Films, was formed soon after, and Agatha, the story of a period

INTRODUCTION

7

during which the mystery writer Agatha Christie disappeared, was a collaboration of First Artists, Sweetwall, and several entrepreneurial independent producers (including Joseph Losey’s son Gavrik). Deeming the outcome unsatisfactory, Hoffman brought suit against First Artists to have Sweetwall’s name removed from the credits, claiming the film was “not a Sweetwall production” because Hoffman’s own “voice was not heard” in it (“Hoffman’s Heavy,” Variety, 31 January 1979, 5). Even as he moved more and more into the mainstream, Hoffman became increasingly vocal about creative limitations under the new dispensation. In 1979, he lamented, “The actor is not the author—and that’s frustrating” (Gussow 269). This frustration perhaps accounted for the sharp decline in Hoffman’s film work of the next decade, down from eleven films in the seventies to only four in the eighties. Woody Allen’s career in the seventies was typical in its own way. The profits of his low-budget comedies of the early seventies earned him a longterm contract with United Artists that guaranteed a measure of artistic freedom. By the end of the decade, he would stand as the most independent actor-auteur in mainstream American cinema (David A. Cook 122). Like Hoffman’s career, Allen’s is a complex process of adjustments to the conditions of New Hollywood filmmaking that he also did much to define. In films of the sixties—What’s New Pussycat? (1965) and Casino Royale (1967)— he appears in digressive semi-cameos that disrupt the films’ already tenuous narrative lines. One of his first films of the seventies, Play It Again, Sam (1972, based on Allen’s own Broadway hit of 1969), concerns a nebbishy film critic (played by Allen) being coached in romance by the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. The film comments self-consciously on the incompatibility of Allen’s persona with the iconography of the Old Hollywood, and for much of the rest of the decade Allen moves through a series of comedies such as Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (1972), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975) mostly set in fanciful, exotic, or otherworldly locations, connecting to the Zeitgeist, if at all, only in the spirit of their comedy. In the trilogy that ends the decade, Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), and Manhattan (1979), Allen perfects the construction of an insular, self-contained world required to accommodate his distinctive comic vision, even while relocating the films to contemporary New York City. If these films tap into the temper of their time, it is only in their underlying sensibility; on the surface, they refuse the spirit of contemporaneity, topical reference, or social-problem vigilance that defined seventies movies, especially those set in New York, from The French Connection (1971) to Taxi Driver (1976) and beyond. As Pauline Kael wrote of Interiors, it’s

8

JAMES MORRISON

Woody Allen, with Diane Keaton at left, in control on the set of Annie Hall (United Artists, 1977). Personal collection of James Morrison.

“austere and studied” (When the Lights Go Down 440) like “a well-made play from the American past” (437). This sense of insularity might have made Allen a natural star for the “culture of narcissism,” but it would not have worked if narcissism were not among Allen’s chief comic targets, or if it were not wed to two dominant new preoccupations of seventies Hollywood, sexuality and Jewishness. Indeed, despite his physical appearance departing from the norms of Hollywood romance and idealized masculinity, Allen is perhaps, in his way, the most sexual film star of the decade, at least in the sense that nearly every one of his films depicts him in the act of lovemaking. To be sure, his films typically concern sexual anxiety, and they dependably express a “level of hysteria about sexual normalcy and otherness” (DeAngelis 92). Even if the sex scenes act out Allen’s own narcissistic yet self-hating fantasies of intimacy with beautiful shiksa figures, as has often been remarked, their willfulness alone projects a quality of sexual confidence, and they transgress traditional Hollywood notions of heterosexuality in several ways. Considering the overlay of anxiety, Allen’s exhibitionism often registers as defi-

INTRODUCTION

9

ance, an indifference to whether some will find the spectacle of seeing him engaged in sexual acts distasteful. The sexuality of his star persona is voracious, promiscuous, casual, and friendly. Although the films contain jokes about sexual objectification of women—“I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you,” says his character in Manhattan—they never, in fact, objectify Allen’s female partners. His attitudes toward these women are encapsulated in another line from Manhattan, a self-mocking yet tender admonition to his seventeenyear-old lover: “I want you to enjoy me—my wry sense of humor and astonishing sexual technique.” The films suggest that sex should be a mutually enjoyable sensuous pleasure, but its puzzling blockage infuses their increasingly tragic sense, culminating in the arid, sterile, sexless universe of Interiors, Allen’s first “serious” film. Although jealousy and infidelity are common themes in his work, they convey not the desirability of “faithfulness” but the problematic nature of monogamy. In Allen’s films, sexuality is understood first and foremost as a function of affection and friendship, suggesting a kinship with certain styles of gay male sexuality, despite Allen’s occasional homophobia. For all their seemingly celebratory jokes about “perversion,” the films do ultimately reinforce a version of normative heterosexuality that is new on American screens. Allen’s Jewishness complements his persona’s sexuality. The most virulent anti-Semitic images portray Jews as both deviant and asexual (Bartov 139–40; see also Desser and Friedman 34–52); Allen’s own jokes about deviancy and his characters’ irrepressible sexuality directly confront and counter this legacy. Yet what is most striking about Allen’s Jewishness, just when Hollywood’s long–standing repression of Jewishness only appeared to be ebbing, is how casual it is, how matter-of-fact and undefensive. As Omer Bartov notes, Allen’s type is one “who is unmistakably Jewish but no longer constrained by any dietary, social, or religious limitation . . . the successfully assimilated Jew, who nevertheless has not entirely disappeared as a Jew” (225). Especially considering the free-floating anxiety of Allen’s films, surprisingly little of it is attached to either the sexuality or Jewishness of Allen’s characters—despite popular wisdom to the contrary. Allen’s jokes about anti-Semitism reveal that he takes its prevalence for granted, as in the dinner scene in Annie Hall where WASPs perceive him as an orthodox rabbi, yet he is also able to joke about Jewish paranoia, as in the line from the same film about hearing the phrase “D’you eat?” as an anti-Semitic slur. Allen’s ambition to leave comedy behind for serious work was noted as early as the Time cover story that certified his newfound stardom (“Rabbit Running,” 3 July 1972, 58–61), although the accompanying interview is

10

JAMES MORRISON

peppered with jokes stolen from Allen’s own standup routines of the sixties. The anonymous writer of the piece, learning of the comic’s “serious” proclivities, worries that Allen has ambitions to play Hamlet, a sentiment echoed directly six years later in Pauline Kael’s review of Interiors: “The film might be a representation of the traditional schizophrenia of Jewish comics, who have had the respect for serious achievement planted in them so early that even after they’ve made the world laugh they still feel they’re failures because they haven’t played Hamlet” (When the Lights Go Down 438–39). Those who claim Allen was palatable to a mass audience because he was somehow “unthreatening” may underestimate the persistence of American anti-Semitism. Allen’s major achievement in the seventies was to become the most important male American film star to that date who was, without the slightest whiff of apology, “all about Jewish identity” (Bartov 224).

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli

In previous decades, male stars were as routinely associated with the musical genre as women were: Fred Astaire in the 1930s, Bing Crosby in the 1940s, and Gene Kelly in the 1950s. That this was no longer the case by the seventies suggests not only the declining fortunes of that genre but the limits of change in the New Hollywood. Two of the most important women in American movies of the seventies spent much of the decade negotiating a complex relation with the musical, the Old Hollywood, and the new order. Barbra Streisand’s work mounts a concerted dialogue between old-style show biz and contemporary stardom. Her first film of the decade, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), is in some sense a throwback to the oldfashioned Hollywood musical, with a script by Alan Jay Lerner and period costumes by Cecil Beaton suggesting a close association to George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964). An unsuccessful Broadway show repackaged as a vehicle for Streisand, who had a major hit recording with the title song, the film concerns a contemporary character (Streisand) who realizes in psychotherapy that she is the reincarnation of a nineteenth-century coquette. Thus, the plot explicitly concerns an unresolved relation between past and present. Unlike its source material, however, the film emphasizes sharp differences between the two periods, with location shooting in New York City contrasting with the artifice of the movie’s sumptuous evocation of the past. Streisand’s performance especially marks the distinction between her fauxgenteel former incarnation, which she plays as high parody, and her role as a modern urban Jewish woman.

INTRODUCTION

11

Much of Streisand’s career of the seventies works out a similar dynamic. Its key feature is her effort to break away from the musical, a genre that would be pronounced dead more than once in the course of the decade. Only three of her nine films of the seventies are musicals, and the other two aside from Clear Day, Funny Lady (1975), and A Star Is Born (1976), subordinate musical to dramatic elements. In films like The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) and Up the Sandbox (1972), Streisand bids for a sharply contemporary image, playing respectively a sharp-tongued prostitute and a New York housewife acting out often transgressive fantasies. Her films continue to draw on older forms: What’s Up Doc? (1972) evokes the “screwball” comedies of the 1930s, The Way We Were (1973) thrives on nostalgia for the recent past, and A Star Is Born recycles film material from 1937 and 1954. Yet in each case, the process of updating these forms is central to the films. What’s Up Doc? is set in the present, The Way We Were deconstructs certain popular images of the 1950s, and A Star Is Born features Streisand in her trendiest part, in full time-capsule seventies regalia, complete with protogrunge or pseudo-glam fashions and a frizzed Afro, as she plays a Janis Joplin–like rock star. As reflected in her first credit as producer on A Star Is Born, Streisand was more involved in shaping her own projects as the decade progressed. Yet because she was reticent to deal with the press, she exerted less control over her public image. Columnists like Joyce Haber in the Los Angeles Times, Rex Reed in syndication, and Earl Wilson in the New York Post were frequently hostile, painting her as a narcissistic, difficult diva. After Funny Girl, Haber called her in 1969 “a full-fledged girl monster” (unpublished manuscript for “Calendar” item, Streisand file, Herrick Library, 5), citing her disrespect toward William Wyler, her demands for multiple takes, and her criticisms of the daily rushes. Largely silent on the extratextual constructions of her image, Streisand is unusually explicit in addressing these constructions in her work. She was commonly depicted as an “ugly duckling”—a typical comment was that she became a star even “without having her nose fixed, teeth capped, or name changed” (Brenda Marshall, “Barbra Streisand: For and Against Women’s Lib,” Whisper, April 1973, 62)—so in response she appears opposite such bona fide sex symbols of the decade as Ryan O’Neal and Robert Redford. As if reacting to charges of being a diva, Streisand plays characters poised between empowerment and vulnerability, often singing or smiling through tears. One scene in Funny Lady plays like a direct reply to Haber: as Fanny Brice, Streisand prepares for a recording session by overseeing every detail of the production and issuing minute instructions, until would-be producer Billy Rose (James

12

JAMES MORRISON

Caan) counters her orders with directions of his own. Following some barbed verbal sparring, Brice/Streisand admits he is right and proceeds with the performance in a spirit of spontaneous improvisation. In her rare interviews of the seventies, this is just the view of her relation to her work that Streisand promotes: meticulous, professional, businesslike, adaptable (Marshall, Whisper 36–37). In her most obvious effort of the decade to bolster her image, Streisand appeared in “From Funny Girl to Funny Lady,” a stage gala at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, that was broadcast live on television on 9 March 1975, as a benefit for the Special Olympics. A retrospective of her own career emphasizing the process of her maturation, the show presents Streisand as a paragon of cooperation in her warm interactions with costars such as Dick Cavett and James Caan. In a pre-show backstage interview with Cavett, she highlights her own vulnerability in admitting to her nervousness, but sings effortlessly in a duet with Caan in which she graciously refrains from overwhelming his singing voice with her own. Affectionately alluding to Streisand’s gawkier persona of the sixties, the show chronicles her rise to her current celebrity with a glamour made auratic by its “live” status, yet ennobled by its charitable cause. Thus, halfway through the seventies, Streisand reaches the dual apotheosis of humanized diva and

Barbra Streisand, both celebrity and producer, with Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, Warner Brothers, 1976). Personal collection of James Morrison.

INTRODUCTION

13

superstar-as-selfless-humanitarian (a model of stardom pioneered by Jane Fonda, as Maria Pramaggiore shows in chapter 1), images she will maintain for the next three decades. Even so, by the end of the seventies, Streisand had come to represent something of stardom’s underside in her relationship with hairdresserturned-producer Jon Peters. Looking back to Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and Classical Hollywood in the first years of the decade, Streisand looked forward to the age of package deals and conglomeration in the second half. As agent, manager, producer, and lover, Peters typified the brash moguls of the New Hollywood and after; as such, Streisand’s partnership with him was viewed as final evidence of her compact with the new order (Brenner 48–55). Peters was more active in constructing Streisand’s image, and adjusting it to the times, than she had ever been, proclaiming that A Star Is Born would finally give the world “a beautiful, sensual Barbra, the Barbra that I have experienced” (Griffin and Masters 36). Although it clearly presaged the wave of the future, their collaboration produced a backlash that may have led to the failure of her last (and worst) film of the decade, The Main Event (1979) (Frank Pierson, “My Battles with Barbra and Jon,” New West, 22 November 1976, 27–43). By the eighties, Streisand would have to reinvent herself. Another figure on the cusp of old and new Hollywood, Liza Minnelli pursued a course that paralleled Streisand’s in many ways. Both were initially associated with girlish awkwardness as opposed to traditional star glamour, both were known as singers and worked in the waning genre of the musical, and both sought early recognition of their dramatic abilities apart from their vocal talents. Minnelli’s first three films were nonmusicals in which she played endearing misfits: Charlie Bubbles (1967), The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970). After the success of Cabaret (1972), however, her remaining four films of the decade were musicals (Journey Back to Oz [1974], and New York, New York [1977]) or semi-musicals (Lucky Lady [1975] and A Matter of Time [1976]). Minnelli’s family background, as the daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, was a major issue in the construction of her image from the start of her career. Articles about her in the seventies mention her role as the heir to a putative Hollywood dynasty, creating a tension between her pride in this legacy and her will to forge a distinct identity. “I’m not my mother, I’m me,” Minnelli declares at the start of her career (“Liza Does Things Her Own Way,” Screen and Television Album, July 1968, 68). Mia Farrow recounts an oft-repeated anecdote in a Newsweek profile to publicize Cabaret as “the essence of Liza”: according to the story, Minnelli concluded

14

JAMES MORRISON

her early performance at Hollywood’s Coconut Grove, which her parents attended, by singing Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” with its telling lines: “Mama may have,/and Papa may have,/but God Bless the Child that’s got his own” (S. K. Oberbeck, “Liza Minnelli: A Star Is Born,” 28 February 1972, 86). A piece in Life the same month defines Minnelli as “a secondgeneration star” who “finds her own strong voice” as Sally Bowles in Cabaret (“Liza Minnelli,” 4 February 1972, 36). Minnelli’s effort to claim an identity separate from her familial heritage often turns on her distance from traditional celebrity glamour. She is described as a “kookie” girl, “crashing tony restaurants wearing baggy sweaters and jeans” (Oberbeck 82). Her roles before Cabaret all associate her with sixties youth and “generation gap” themes with counterculture overtones. Minnelli herself promotes this view in interviews: “I’ve worn jeans in all my movies,” she says in the 1972 Life profile (36). Cabaret is the turning point in which, as Minnelli says in the same interview, “now I get to be glamorous” (36). This transition is remarked frequently as the metamorphosis of the “knee-socked” ingénue into the “voluptuous Liza steamily vamp[ing] her way across the screen” (Oberbeck 82). As her first musical role on screen, Cabaret reclaims Minnelli’s lineage. Yet nobody had ever described Garland as “steamy” or “voluptuous”—nor would Minnelli ever again be discussed in such terms—and Cabaret takes on themes like bisexuality, decadence, and the rise of Nazism that distinguish it clearly from the classic Hollywood musical. Minnelli’s turn as Sally Bowles stands in contrast to the “all-American, girl next door image” (Dyer, Heavenly Bodies 156) of Garland in the 1930s and 1940s. Even so, the character’s voluptuary exoticism and cosmopolitan glamour conceal an underlay of the “ordinariness” that had, according to Richard Dyer, made Garland an object of gay cult fandom (156–68). Combined with the film’s treatment of homosexual themes and Minnelli’s association with youthful rebellion, these characteristics made her a fitting icon for the early years of gay liberation, extending her mother’s role as an emblem of the pre-Stonewall era. For the rest of the decade, Minnelli’s career meditates on the legacy of the old Hollywood, engaging explicitly with Garland’s image. Her next film is an animated sequel to the film that made her mother a star, The Wizard of Oz (1939)—Journey Back to Oz, in which Minnelli provides the voice for Dorothy, the role Garland played in 1939. Here, Minnelli tempers the brassy, torchsong style of Cabaret, simulating the sweet, plaintive emotiveness of her mother’s films from the thirties and forties. Lucky Lady attempted to mix the spirit of a 1930s Clark Gable and Carol Lombard film with the edginess and violence of the New Hollywood, with Minnelli and director Stanley Donen

INTRODUCTION

15

standing in for the former and co-stars Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman for the latter. A major box-office failure, the film ultimately ensnared Minnelli in legal wrangling with Donen (Marilyn Beck, “Liza Minnelli’s Big Act May Play for the Courts,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9 February 1978, IV:2), as if to symbolize her conflict with the style he embodied and she represented, however reluctantly, in its latter-day forms. In her last film of the decade, Martin Scorsese’s musical pastiche New York, New York, she continues to signify that style and, as in Lucky Lady, plays against a much more “contemporary” style. In Scorsese’s film, the New Hollywood is symbolized by Robert De Niro, who plays a jazz musician involved in a stormy romance with Minnelli’s big-band singer. A complex meditation on these competing styles, the film exposes both the naïve artificiality of the Old Hollywood and the inarticulate, primitive rawness in certain quarters of the New Hollywood (including Scorsese’s previous films). The failure of the characters’ romance suggests that the two Hollywoods can never be reconciled, a portentous conclusion indeed for Minnelli’s future as a star, and indicative of larger changes to come that would play out over the course of the decade.

1 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Jane Fonda From Graylist to A-List MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

By 1970, Jane Fonda had been an international celebrity for nearly a decade, as a result of her prolific screen and stage work. During the 1960s, she acted in seventeen feature films in the United States and France, several Broadway plays, and a television special, while also working intermittently as a fashion model. Fonda catapulted to fame trailing a star persona that wedded her Hollywood pedigree (as the daughter of respected studio-era actor Henry Fonda) to a conventional model of stardom for attractive female performers in postwar America: the pin-up girl (Dyer, Stars 66). Less fragile and more impudent than her somewhat older Actor’s Studio cohort Marilyn Monroe, Fonda was labeled the wholesomely sexy 16

JANE FONDA

17

American Brigitte Bardot. The sexual libertinism of the films she made with her husband, French director Roger Vadim, especially the campy space-age Barbarella (1968), only endeared Fonda more to her American fans. A review of Fonda’s 1960 film debut in Tall Story established a strange yet definitive image for her early stardom that endured well into the seventies. Playing the role of a husband-hungry college cheerleader, she was “a second generation Fonda with a smile like her father’s and legs like a chorus girl” (“New Pictures,” Time, 11 April 1960). Dyer has noted that the frequent juxtaposition of Henry and Jane Fonda established an important theme shaping the latter’s celebrity in the sixties and seventies, wherein “her relationship to her father [was] seen as of paramount importance” (66). To be sure, in the early seventies, Fonda’s intensity, outspokenness, and high-spirited provocations were widely understood within a framework of attention-seeking bad-girl behavior, chalked up to her difficult relationship with her taciturn father. A self-proclaimed rebel, prone to championing “underdogs” and “misfits,” Fonda not only participated in, but also came to embody, the matrix of social conflicts in the United States known as the generation gap. Young nonconformists—“bums,” as President Richard Nixon called them—challenged the traditional values and exposed the hypocrisy of the Establishment, often focusing on government authorities such as Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird: very bad daddies, indeed. Within this zeitgeist, Fonda’s image as a sexy rebel shunning her privileged origins—the daughter of a famous father and wealthy socialite mother—elevated her beyond film stardom or political notoriety to the status of culture icon. Ten years after her screen debut, Fonda was no longer a mere celebrity; she had become a cause célèbre. In the early seventies, her fame rested upon her political activism, not her gorgeous gams: they would make their legwarmer-clad comeback before the decade was out with the Jane Fonda Workout. In the context of Fonda’s five decades of stardom, the 1970s represents the critical decade, and the year 1970 was the turning point. As if on cue, in that year the thirty-two-year-old Fonda radically and irrevocably transformed her image through her committed engagement with progressive politics, especially the effort to end the Vietnam War. Initially more eager than well-informed, Fonda sought to use her fame to redirect the attention of her fans, her critics, international political leaders—anyone who would listen, really—toward pressing social issues. By the end of the decade, she had attached herself to, and had sometimes became the self-appointed spokesperson for, a dizzying array of causes, including struggles against racism, the antiwar movement, feminism, and

18

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

environmentalism. Despite the breadth of her activities, it was her 1972 trip to Hanoi, where she was photographed on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft emplacement, that made her the target of derision and death threats and earned her the moniker “Hanoi Jane.” While she was channeling her star power, her money, and her time into myriad social causes, Fonda also navigated the seismic wave rippling through the film industry. As it threw off the vestiges of the studio system and moved through the experiment with independent filmmaking, the New Hollywood emerged as a horizontally integrated corporate enterprise in the 1980s. While the American public focused on her political foibles, Fonda expanded her professional horizons beyond acting so that she could make socially engaged films. She established a production company, Indochina Peace Committee, to develop antiwar projects: these included F.T.A. (1972) (“Free the Army” or “Fuck the Army”), a political cabaret for GIs that offered an alternative to Bob Hope’s jingoistic USO tour, and the Vietnam documentary Introduction to the Enemy (1974), a film she made with her second husband, sixties activist Tom Hayden, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler. She later renamed the company IPC Films and used it to produce some of her most commercially successful films, including The China Syndrome (1979) and Nine to Five (1980). The late seventies represent the high point of Fonda’s Hollywood stardom. She followed up her first Academy Award for her performance in Klute (1971) with another for Coming Home (1978). She starred in a string of hits, beginning with Fun with Dick and Jane (1977). Coming Home, The China Syndrome, and The Electric Horseman (1979) were all top twenty films (Cook 498–502). With such commercial clout, Fonda became a major player, one of “only a handful of women” to wield power in an increasingly star-centric Hollywood (Krämer 104–5). In 1978 and 1979–80, Fonda was named bankable in an industry that had come to rely upon stars to provide a hedge against risk (Cook 339). She was a member of the upper echelon of movie stars; for example, she secured a $2 million pay-or-play agreement with Columbia for a film that was never made (Cook 348). Having first negotiated the independent ethos of New Hollywood, Fonda then rode the second important industrial wave of the decade, the blockbuster phenomenon. If her edgy performance in Klute demonstrated Fonda’s affinity for the downbeat aesthetic of the early seventies, then the screwball office comedy Nine to Five secured her status in the corporate environment that was emerging at the end of decade. The film grossed $103 million, ranking second behind The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and foreshadowed the practices of horizontal integration that came to be associated

JANE FONDA

19

with New Hollywood. The soundtrack went platinum and the film spawned a television series that Fonda co-produced. Thus, as the enervated seventies gave way to the Reagan eighties, Fonda, who had begun the decade facing down the Establishment, came to symbolize the return of unapologetic capitalism: she was a “late-blooming businesswoman,” managing hit films and an aerobics empire (Maureen Orth, “The Education of Jane Fonda,” Savvy, February 1982, 32). It seemed beside the point that her profits bankrolled Tom Hayden’s leftist political career and the Campaign for Economic Progress, an organization she had founded with him in 1974 to address tenants’ rights, solar energy, and other progressive issues. Fonda played a key role in the crises that rocked the apocalyptic seventies, from Vietnam to the Watergate scandal to the nuclear catastrophe at Three Mile Island, and her association with these events overshadowed her film career, although less so by decade’s end. She helped to define the cultural iconography of the seventies, and therefore her example is important to understanding the shift from the star system of the Hollywood studio era to contemporary practices of celebrity. The way Fonda’s image was constructed and deployed—through her own efforts as well as studio publicity and press coverage—contributed to the reconfiguration of stardom itself. Jane Fonda’s recruitment of her star image to bring attention to the world outside the cinema offers one example of the way that, in post-studio Hollywood, stars became privileged in relation to the ostensible product of their work, detaching themselves from individual films and from cinema as a social institution. Fonda’s case represents one step in the (perhaps inevitable) industrial process that reversed the traditional division between the all-important, profitable end product—the film—and the valuable yet expendable production input—the movie star. Jane Fonda also created an entirely new category of stardom—the celebrity humanitarian. Fonda’s image shifted in important ways across the seventies: at the height of her activism (1970–74), she was viewed as an oversexed, mouthy child, whereas after her post-Vietnam “comeback” in 1977, she was constructed as an emblematic figure for second-wave feminists on the path of self-discovery. Because her activist and actor personas were consolidated in the late seventies through a narrative of hard work and a search for authenticity, Fonda’s example may initially appear to be inconsistent with the ethos of twenty-first-century stardom, where reality television, tabloids, and blogs purvey a form of celebrity so insubstantial and indiscriminate that identity itself sometimes appears synonymous with fame. Yet Fonda often contributed to the political and screen discourses that consistently privileged the star over her film work by treating movies as her day job. Her

20

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

press and promotional materials downplayed traditional markers of stardom such as beauty, acting talent, and the ability to connect with an audience and, instead, emphasized her activism (1970–74) or the close relationship between her political interests and her films (1977–80). Fonda’s case highlights one way in which the seventies incubated the now-familiar business model wherein films have become ancillary to the profit-generating consumer product. The vital importance to the star’s legacy of “being Jane Fonda” was predicted by a subtle interchange in Klute, her first film of the 1970s. Prescient indeed is a scene in which Bree Daniels (Fonda), a freelance hooker and ersatz actor, is desperate for an audition. She tells the director who scowlingly peruses her portfolio, “I forget myself when I act.” This turns out to be the wrong answer; the director has recently survived an identity crisis, and he believes that one must “really” know oneself in order to act. He abruptly concludes the interview and abandons Bree to her formidable insecurities. This scene presages the critical issue for Fonda’s stardom in the seventies. After her emergence as a political icon, neither Fonda nor her fans were permitted to forget who she was (or who she had been, for that matter, as her image inevitably became a palimpsest; see Sørensen.) In the early seventies, Fonda’s activist persona overwhelmed her then few screen roles in fairly obscure projects. In the late seventies, Fonda’s personas as activist and actor were closely integrated with the films that she made, primarily through her much-reported role as a producer. In this context, her screen characters ratified and reinforced her offscreen persona, which remained dominant. It seems ironic that Fonda, whose work ethic was repeatedly characterized as a no-nonsense professionalism, who lived relatively modestly outside the Hollywood party circuit, and who attempted to make films that offered more than mere entertainment, contributed so much to the industry’s overvaluation of the star persona. On the eve of her emergence as the quintessential seventies icon, a New York Post headline read, “Jane Fonda: Identity’s Not Everything”; this sentiment would prove to be wishful thinking (Arthur Greenspan, 20 December 1969, 29).

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Early Seventies: Daddy’s Little Radical Girl

The important differences in Fonda’s celebrity discourses in the early and the later years of the decade reflect the critical and continuing importance of gender and heredity to her celebrity. Early images of

JANE FONDA

21

Fonda onscreen—physical conflations of a father’s toothy grin atop a daughter’s alluring legs—serve as a useful metaphor for Fonda’s multifaceted gender misbehavior. The scandalous collage simultaneously suggests a cross-gender identification of daughter with father and even the specter of an incestuous desire between them. The grafting of father onto daughter, which also implies a blending of masculine and feminine characteristics, informed Fonda’s persona as a political figure and an actor in the early seventies. The tropes that were employed to contain her political obstreperousness drew upon her sixties sex-kitten persona while at the same time alluding to her father (or father figures), depicting her as daddy’s naughty little girl. If Fonda became a representative figure in the national imagination during this decade—standing in as “America’s daughter” (Anderegg 30)—it was partly because she was repeatedly paired with paternal characters onscreen and offscreen. After 1977, however, as Fonda’s relationship with her father gradually receded from public discourse (partly because of her marriage to and political partnership with Hayden), this dual relation of identification and desire began to migrate into her film roles, as her characters often interacted with father figures and also exhibited traits that harkened back to Henry Fonda’s screen persona. Setting aside the filial relationship for a moment, the gender blending aspect of Fonda’s persona was apparent throughout the seventies, a decade when sexual frankness and androgyny flourished in popular culture. Fonda’s aggressive women characters in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and Klute; her shag haircut, first styled by a “man’s barber” (Greenspan, “Identity’s Not Everything” 29); and her slim, athletic body, all signified her rejection of her nubile sex-goddess image and an embrace of the tomboyish seventies antiheroine. As Fonda aged, however, her boyishness acquired a distinctive patina of staunch righteousness, which linked her to Henry Fonda’s screen persona in a way that avoided the imagined sexual tension between father and daughter which had dominated her image during the early part of the decade. In the early seventies, Fonda’s actions interacted with this nexus of feminine and masculine, daughter and father, to generate a surprisingly consistent narrative focusing on her activist persona. Press coverage of her political appearances at rallies and on television reflected a pronounced anxiety about agency. The central concern was whether or not Fonda controlled herself; the oft-stated conclusion was that men manipulated her. This focus on women’s autonomy also informed the narrative of her bestknown film of the period, Klute.

22

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

“The Virginia Graham Show” (1970) serves as a vehicle for Fonda’s political activism, June 1970. Personal collection of Maria Pramaggiore.

Press accounts from 1970 until around 1974 focus on Fonda’s politics and depict her as either a poised, fervent, and outspoken woman on a mission to save America from itself, or, conversely, as a treasonous ingrate. In 1970, Fonda commenced her activist career by visiting the Alcatraz occupation, traveling to army bases with protesting American Indians, and embarking on a cross-country automobile trip with Elisabeth Vailland, a radical friend from France. She met Fred Gardner and began visiting the GI coffeehouses that he had established in off-base locations where soldiers could freely voice their opinions about the war. In May, the New York Post featured Fonda in a photo essay that sums up the frenetic pace of her activism: she was pictured “marching for Indian rights in Seattle,” “fasting in downtown Denver,” and “under arrest at Fort Hood” (Michael Kernan, “Up Against the Army” 21). In November, she was arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, on drug smuggling and assault charges that were later dropped, in part because the “drugs” were vitamins. Fonda accused the government of harassment, a charge which later proved to be true. In 1974, journalist Jack Anderson obtained part of her FBI file and revealed that she had become a target of COINTELPRO, J. Edgar

JANE FONDA

23

Hoover’s program to discredit leaders of the antiwar movement. The government was particularly concerned with Fonda’s connection to antiwar GIs and, specifically, her role in the F.T.A. revue (which had toured the Pacific) and her fundraising for the Winter Soldier investigation (1971), an event sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War where veterans testified about American war crimes in Southeast Asia. The government’s campaign of surveillance and misinformation culminated in an FBI file totaling 20,000 pages. Fonda won the distinction of being the first American citizen spied upon by the CIA (Fonda 256). Fonda’s vociferous commitment to ending the Vietnam War and her methods of protesting—humanizing the Vietnamese as well as American GIs and exposing the lies of the Nixon administration—landed her on the White House enemies list. The fact that she was persona non grata in Washington was not yet apparent to her fans, but they were aware of her tireless efforts: her speeches, protests, and public statements made for sensational headlines in newspapers and magazines. Her establishment opponents trivialized her with gendered rhetoric, dismissing her by citing her sixties image. During a public debate at which Fonda mentioned entering politics, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird sarcastically proclaimed his “support” for the candidacy of a “bare bottomed actress”–making reference to a billboard advertisement for La Ronde (1965) that featured Fonda’s bare derrière, against her wishes (Dyer, Stars 73). Fonda moved from being a thorn in the administration’s side to fullfledged public enemy after her trip to North Vietnam in July 1972. She sought and acquired proof (on film reels since lost) that Nixon’s purported de-escalation of the war was a craven fiction: she found the U.S. bombing of civilian targets, including dikes, could flood the rice paddies and cause widespread starvation. The famous photograph of Fonda aboard a North Vietnamese antiaircraft emplacement was a rallying point for conservative politicians who wished to defame her, as the American public had turned against the war, in part thanks to the adverse publicity protesters like Fonda were providing. Congressmen Fletcher Thompson and Richard Ichord demanded that she be charged with treason. (Because the United States had never officially declared war on Vietnam, and treason is a wartime offense, Fonda could not be prosecuted.) Damning in a different way were responses from the activist ranks that implied Fonda was in over her head. She was accused of being a dilettante and an opportunist, partly because she misrepresented issues. Buffy St. Marie castigated her for not adequately grasping or communicating American Indian causes (Kiernan 268). Photoplay reported that the Navajo Indians

24

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

had asked her to stay away (Cal York, “You Must Read It First in Photoplay,” December 1970, 30). Feminist leader Betty Friedan accused Fonda of “hurting the real movement for women’s rights” (John J. Miller, “Jane Fonda’s War Is with Her Father,” The Column, 10 September 1972, 9). A consensus view in newspapers and popular magazines suggested that Fonda sought public attention because of personal problems. Coverage was tinged with the presumption that the psychological motive for her behavior grew from her mother’s suicide and her father’s authoritarianism, two biographical details that had been unearthed in the sixties. In March 1971, Photoplay suggested that her political involvement with the Black Panthers “upset Daddy no end with those headlines” (“Nothing Plain About Jane,” 74). Fonda was characterized as a childish figure controlled by the men in her life, foremost among them her father. She was referred to in one New York Times article as “Baby Jane”: an aging princess and potential psychopath who, like Bette Davis’s character in the 1962 Aldrich film, remained suspended in a state of arrested development (Gerald Jonas, “Here’s What Happened to Baby Jane,” 22 January 1967, 91). A few months after the Hanoi trip, the Denver Post noted that “Jane Fonda Traveled Far from Daddy’s Lap” (Mary Campbell, 6 August 1972, n.p.). In September, a photo essay in The Column was emblazoned, “Jane Fonda’s War Is Against Her Father” (John J. Miller 8–9). A piece in Seventeen that same month read, “Fervent Eyes of Fonda Blue” (Edwin Miller, September 1972, 134). Summoning this particular familial trait in 1972 connoted sadistic intensity to the father-daughter identification, because Henry’s cobalt eyes had featured prominently in his turn as the incorrigibly evil Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). That Fonda was aware of the absurdity of such headlines is clear from a piece she wrote for the L.A. Free Press: “How I invaded two U.S. Forts simultaneously with 86 Braves on horseback (At least that’s what the establishment press implied)” (20–26 March 1970, 4). Fonda was cast (and cast herself) opposite surrogate father figures as well. After she refrained from making a political speech when accepting her Academy Award for Klute in 1972, Rolling Stone compared Fonda with an actor who had returned his award for Patton the year before. The title of the article quoted a defensive Fonda directly: “So What’s George C. Scott Done?” Called upon to explain why she accepted the Oscar, she pointed out that Scott’s decision to refuse his (which he attributed to the absurdity of such awards) lacked political impact (Tim Findley, 25 May 1972, 42). The press’s constant pairing of Fonda with men, together with the concern (or unspoken wish) that they were dominating her, were carryovers from her sixties star text. Husband Roger Vadim was seen as a latter-day

JANE FONDA

25

Svengali, exploiting Fonda in films that purported to liberate her sexuality. (This charge was first leveled against actor Andreas Voutsinas, her lover prior to Vadim.) This notion crystallized amidst a controversy surrounding a Playboy photo spread published in 1966 that revealed Fonda at poolside with Vadim, wearing only a bikini bottom as the two apparently discussed script changes. A rumor emerged that Vadim had allowed the pictures to be taken without her knowledge. When Fonda lodged vociferous protests, she was judged to be extremely cynical or the dupe of her own husband. Similar sentiments arose when radical French filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin released Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972). Fonda had worked with Godard on Tout va bien (1972), a film about a factory strike and a troubled relationship in which she was paired with Yves Montand who, at sixteen years her senior, represented another father figure. The fifty-one-minute Letter to Jane consists of a rigorous formal and political analysis of still images of Tout va bien, a news photograph of Fonda in Vietnam published by the Viet Cong, and images of other actors, including Henry Fonda. The voiceover commentary draws connections between the Fonda photograph and the questions raised by Tout va bien. Godard and Gorin also castigate Fonda for her “tragic expression that says nothing more than it knows,” and imply that Fonda was unaware of the role she was playing as an actress in the “theater of military operations.” While the two French directors implied that Fonda had allowed her image to be used by the Viet Cong in ways that she did not fully appreciate, American commentators jumped to Fonda’s defense on the grounds that she had been used and abused by the directors. A Fonda biographer called the film “cruel” (Kiernan 280), while a film critic, interviewed in the New York Times, said it was a “a closely reasoned, if nasty, provocation by two male-bonded ingrates [ . . . ] against the female movie star who so generously collaborated with them on their otherwise unbudgetable feature” (Diane Jacobs, “Waiting for Godard,” New York Times, 29 November 1998). Yet these nagging questions regarding Fonda’s agency were not merely strategies for obsessively foregrounding the father-daughter relationship’s dominative aspects, a narrative to which Fonda herself contributed. As she noted in a McCall’s interview with Oriana Fallaci, “You don’t have a father like that without being influenced or impressed . . . I respect him a lot and for a while I was completely dominated by him [ . . . ] He sincerely worries about me, he sincerely thinks that I am manipulated by someone” (“Jane Fonda: I’m Coming into Focus,” February 1971, 149). They also resonated politically in an era in which government authorities had updated the alieninvasion rhetoric of the Cold War 1950s with notions of outside agitators.

26

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

Drawing upon the Svengali model, charges of manipulation were leveled against the political leaders Fonda associated with, including Fred Gardner, Peter Collier, Donald Duncan, and Mark Lane; the North Vietnamese; and Tom Hayden. Fonda contributed to the notion that she needed guidance by frequently mentioning the male writers and activists whose work inspired her. She sometimes gave credit where none was due, according to former colleague and Ramparts editor Peter Collier, who undermined Fonda’s maturity in his own way by suggesting that praising others was her way of relinquishing responsibility for her actions (“I Remember Fonda,” New West, 24 September 1979, 22). By challenging Fonda’s autonomy—asking whether she was a victim or puppet of the men around her— the rhetoric of women’s liberation was deftly employed to discredit a woman who was outspoken against authority on political and military matters. Feminist writers in the early seventies rarely undermined Fonda by sexualizing or infantilizing her. Most viewed her as a role model, and their admiration was only enhanced by her negative treatment by the press (Perkins 237). Articles and interviews in women’s magazines praised Fonda’s search for her authentic self and countered the claim that powerful men held sway over her. Most striking in early 1970s press accounts—both those that condemn and those that praise her—is their scrutiny of Fonda’s activist persona, particularly its supposed Freudian psychological origins. Writers unabashedly acknowledged Fonda’s status as a figure whose claim to fame rested outside Hollywood and who was far more interesting and important than her roles. Aside from Klute, her early seventies films are completely overlooked, a critical neglect that was enabled by the marginality of F.T.A, A Doll’s House (1973), and Steelyard Blues (1973). Joseph Losey’s A Doll’s House was shunted to ABC television immediately after its debut at the New York Film Festival. And Rex Reed, a perennial Fonda booster, described Steelyard Blues in the New York Daily News as a “total catastrophe,” echoing the sentiments bandied about in the political press regarding Fonda’s need for a paternal spanking: “Never before have actors better demonstrated their roles as children badly in need of the parental discipline of a strong director” (“Steelyard Blues,” 2 February 1973, n.p.).

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Klute and Women’s Agency

Klute focuses on the question of women’s agency in the context of the sexual revolution, subtly reformulating this central issue regarding control that surrounded Fonda’s political notoriety. The plot centers on

JANE FONDA

27

two men who stalk self-sufficient call girl Bree (Fonda): Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi), a john who wants to punish prostitutes like Bree because their erotic energies trigger his puritanical rage and violence; and John Klute (Donald Sutherland), a private detective from Tuscarora, Pennsylvania, who seeks to restore the sullied reputation of a missing friend suspected of having physically assaulted Bree after an assignation, and of continuing to harass her with threatening phone calls. Bree has experienced life at the hands of unscrupulous pimps and abusive johns and has struck out on her own, attempting to find work as an actor. She is unable to relinquish the easy cash and personal satisfaction that comes from hooking, however. Her central conflict, unveiled in sessions with her psychotherapist, involves the degree to which she feels she is in control when she interacts with her clients; selling her body provides a sense of security and accomplishment. By contrast, she has no control over her acting career, which promises her only the ignominy of casual rejection. Nor does she welcome the affective awakening that occurs as a result of her relationship with Klute. Their unlikely romance threatens her emotional safety (just as the murderous john threatens her physical and psychological well-being), because she feels drawn to the prospect of relinquishing some control in exchange for intimacy. Critics praised the film, citing the “nervous intensity” and intelligence that Fonda brought to her portrayal of an independent, yet conflicted, woman, and applauding the chemistry between Fonda and Sutherland (Roger Ebert, “Klute,” Chicago Sun-Times, 1 January 1971). Yet Klute was also condemned as profoundly antifeminist for depicting the “would-be emancipated woman” as “neurotic, fragile, lonely and unhappy” (Gledhill 113). Hollywood rewarded Fonda for her performance with the Academy Award, and then congratulated itself for being brave enough to do so, given her controversial political outspokenness (Pamela Mason, “Don’t Breathe a Word of It,” Photoplay, July 1972, 14). The film’s most important element in articulating Fonda’s agency is that it shows Bree’s struggle for autonomy to be internal and psychological. She wrestles with her own psyche, rather than simply clashing with others over her image, her job, or her relationships. In fact, her fierce maintenance of her hard-won independence and her need to control others suggest parallels to the murderous control that Cable exerts over women. Despite Bree’s best efforts to redefine herself on her own terms, she remains under the surveillance and control of several men. In her work and in her romantic relationship with Klute, she is willingly subservient, sometimes in order to assert her power. She rebelliously returns to her pimp to test the imperturbable

28

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

Klute, for example, and then only slowly allows him the emotional access that so threatens her. The film manifests her objectification through shadowy interiors and first-person point-of-view shots, precursors to the “monster cam” sequences of horror films such as It’s Alive (1974) and Halloween (1978). In terms of the film’s visual techniques and narrative arc, Bree serves as an early example of Carol Clover’s final girl, the terrorized victimsurvivor of slasher films whose attractiveness and gender ambiguity invite identification from diverse spectators. The film’s much-discussed open-ended conclusion leaves unresolved the question of whether Klute’s steadying male influence is actually a stultifying interference. After Klute’s investigation wraps up, Bree tells her therapist in a voiceover that she will probably stay in New York and show up in the analyst’s office the following week. But the image reveals an apartment that has been vacated and implies that she has left the city with Klute. A ringing phone confirms that Bree is no longer taking calls of any kind. Yet this foray into noir New York ends on a generically antithetical and improbably hopeful scenario that Fonda’s later seventies films will drive home again and again: that people can change their lives as a result of their emotional connections with others. If Klute offered a solution, however provisional, to the problem of autonomy raised by the discourse surrounding Fonda’s political persona, the answer seemed to lie in finding a nonpaternal, but still recognizably patriarchal, romantic partner; one who was willing to impose the discipline that naughty girls like Jane and Bree required. Given how the tone of Fonda’s press coverage shifted from the early to the late seventies, it would appear that, along with several other important changes, her marriage to Tom Hayden came close enough to this scenario. Although they were sometimes mocked as a political power couple, the issue of Fonda’s potential vulnerability to manipulation receded after mid-decade.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

After Vietnam

The shift in Fonda’s image from the early to the late seventies was predicated upon several factors: key historical events, concerted efforts by Fonda and the press to consolidate her star discourse by representing her as a feminist film producer in firm control of herself and her image, and the reformulation of the father-daughter dyad within Fonda’s films. But before turning to the late seventies, it’s important to consider briefly the period between 1973 and 1977, years that both she and her

JANE FONDA

29

biographers have described as an unwelcome hiatus imposed by industry “graylisting.” In a 1976 interview in the New York Sunday News, she claims she was given “the full McCarthy treatment” and that “many movie producers actually tried to keep me from getting roles” (Bob Lardine, “They’ve Stopped Hating Jane Fonda,” 28 November 1976, 20). And in Viva the same year, she denies that she was targeted by the industry, adding a feminist slant: “If I haven’t made many movies recently, it’s not because I‘ve been blacklisted, it’s because most of what I was offered was crap. There have been pathetically few movies recently with any women’s roles that say anything” (Claudia Dreifus, “The Taming of a Revolutionary,” May 1976, 47). She told Thomas Kiernan in a Cue interview that, by the end of 1973, “it had been made clear to me by the powers that be in Hollywood that if I didn’t keep my mouth shut, I was finished in Hollywood” (“The Fonda Syndrome,” 2 February 1979, 17). A Cosmopolitan article points out that Fonda was hired for Fun with Dick and Jane in 1975 (Leo Janos, “Superstar Survivor,” June 1978, 195), and Jerome Hellman, who produced Coming Home, stated that it was Fonda’s commitment to the original screenplay that secured the financing from United Artists, suggesting her viability in 1975 (Vanity Fair, September 2008, 194). In her autobiography, Fonda herself credits her antiwar activism with assisting her film career (378). Thus, whether her activism or her weak post-Klute films rendered Fonda too risky for Hollywood, and for how long, remain open questions. Whatever the reason for her lack of participation in mainstream features, Fonda was far from idle. She traveled to Russia to act in the historic— and bizarre—U.S.-Russian co-production of The Blue Bird (1976), directed by George Cukor. She divorced Vadim, married Hayden, gave birth to her second child, and returned to Vietnam. She remained in the public eye as an activist by initiating a lawsuit, ultimately settled in her favor, against Nixon and his cronies for $2.8 million in damages for violating her civil rights. In the latter half of the decade, the virulent animosity directed toward Fonda began to fade in light of the U.S withdrawal from Vietnam (1973) and Nixon’s resignation (1974) and remained generally dormant for more than a decade. In fact, not until the Vietnam revisionism of the late 1980s, jointly orchestrated by Ronald Reagan and Rambo, would the New Right dredge up and reanimate Hanoi Jane (Anderegg 29). However, Fonda’s opposition to nuclear power brought her new enemies in the late seventies. The China Syndrome, a film that she shaped from the script construction to the choice of director, depicted a near meltdown at a nuclear power plant that stemmed from corporate disregard for safety.

30

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

Quirky careerist everywoman Kimberly Wells’s (Fonda) closest friend is her pet turtle in The China Syndrome (James Bridges, Columbia Pictures, 1979). Personal collection of Maria Pramaggiore.

The ominously prophetic film became a major hit when, less than a month after its release, an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, caused local evacuation and national concern. In 1979, shortly after the film’s release, California Governor Jerry Brown attempted to appoint Fonda to the California Arts Council, but the State Senate rejected her bid, twenty-eight to five. In that same year, Fonda was removed from a list of potential commencement speakers at the University of California at Davis for being too controversial, and the “Young Americans for Freedom” hanged Fonda in effigy outside of her Santa Monica home (Lloyd Shearer, “Jane Fonda,” Parade, 16 December 1979, 4). The New York Times reported that General Electric canceled its sponsorship of a Barbara Walters special in which Fonda appeared because of her “controversial” position on nuclear power (Les Brown, “GE Quits Fonda . . . ,” 28 February 1979, C22). A bumper sticker appeared that harked back to her Barbarella days: “What spreads faster than radiation? Jane Fonda.” At the same time, press accounts that pointed to her mellowing as a political activist helped rehabilitate Fonda’s image. She became a “superstar

JANE FONDA

31

Survivor” when she turned forty (Horwath 14). She was seen as coming into her own as a woman, mother, activist, and actor. Margaret Drabble’s title for a Ms. piece suggests the palimpsestic icon that Fonda had become by the late seventies, with a lingering question of whether she finally “owned” herself: “Jane Fonda: from Vadim’s girl; to the Peace Movement’s Cheerleader; to the Candidate’s Wife; to Her Own Woman at Last?” (October 1977, 51). Fonda’s image was rehabilitated because she implicitly ratified the view of her earlier activity as childish rebellion while she forwarded the narrative of a mature, ordinary woman who was qualified for a responsible social engagement (in the parlance of the late seventies): she was part of the solution rather than part of the problem. In 1979, Fonda’s former activist colleague Peter Collier penned a skeptical view of her political transition, which he associated with a shifting concept of political activity in the late seventies that now encompasses seemingly personal issues or lifestyle choices. “Jane uses her glamour to make friends and influence people in high places,” he wrote, “meanwhile accumulating a vast constituency among those who think that going to a film about Vietnam veterans or a reactor melt-down is a political act,” making reference to Coming Home and The China Syndrome (Collier 24). Collier was correct in pointing out that Fonda saw her filmmaking as political; in fact, she frequently asserted this point while promoting her films. In the press kit for The China Syndrome she stated, “I’m entering production to make the kind of movies they don’t write for women, and what I want to concentrate on are films about women in the process of learning what they’re all about” (“China Syndrome Production Information,” Columbia Pictures, Burbank, California, 9). She linked Nine to Five to her political concerns in a Rolling Stone interview: the project “evolved out of my attachment to an organization called 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women, who organized secretaries. It was an interesting and unique example of a very, very popular Hollywood movie working hand and glove with the building of a union” (Sheff 126). Several examples confirm the precise way that Fonda, aided by press and studio publicity materials, emphasized the union of her interests and her films, and presented herself as a woman in control. The personal was the political as well as the professional, according to this narrative. For example, Fonda commented on the deeper meaning of Fun with Dick and Jane, the comedy of downward mobility in which a middle-class suburban couple turns to a life of crime after the breadwinning husband loses his job. Undeterred by her co-star George Segal’s dismissals in promotional press releases, Fonda persisted in explaining that the film held social significance

32

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

for Americans who were encouraged to live beyond their means in a consumer culture. She touted the fact that her films meant something: “I take movies a lot more seriously than I used to. And I refuse to do cynical films. . . . The movies I make will have something to say” (Lardine 6). Just as important, Fonda’s films and her life were shown to coincide, as Photoplay reported that Fonda’s activism earlier in the decade had drained her bank accounts and that she had sold jewelry in New York to stay afloat (Hank Grant, “On the Hollywood Scene,” March 1974, 58). Fonda as producer also called attention to the corporate assimilation of the values promulgated by the social movements she had been associated with. The promotional material for The China Syndrome describes the production staff, which “includes women and racial minority personnel in key positions and represents a conscious effort by [Michael] Douglas, Jane Fonda and [Bruce] Gilbert to practice fair employment policies—a reflection of their strongly held belief in matching their actions to their words” (“China Syndrome Production Information,” 23–24). Yet another example speaks to Fonda’s attempt to integrate her image as a take-charge political woman with her Hollywood stardom. As she made the publicity rounds for Julia (1977), a film about underground resistance to Nazism, Fonda’s comments sparked a disagreement with her co-star, the equally famous and equally pedigreed radical Vanessa Redgrave. Fonda encouraged the conflation of the actors’ politics and the film in one interview with the Washington Post, where she states, “We both play women who were brave and committed . . . there’s an overlapping of life and fiction” (Art Harris, “Redgrave and Fonda and Politics,” 28 October 1977, 11). But Redgrave abruptly interrupts Fonda, saying, “Nonsense” (Harris 11). The obviously bemused reporter witnessing this exchange provides one clue as to why Fonda’s late seventies persona became so compelling. “Much easier to talk to Fonda,” Art Harris writes, “who at least admits to mixing life on and off the screen” (11). The formula that mixed art and life, with heavy emphasis on the biographical, had defined the press coverage of Fonda’s political career in the early years of the decade and it would serve again in this context: reporters were increasingly eager for soft news items to feed an expanding celebrity culture, fed by press organs such as People Magazine, which replaced Life Magazine in 1974. Fonda’s life mixed with art, and that recipe reconciled her extraordinary biography with the ordinariness of her characters in the late seventies. In comparison to unforgettable, larger-than-life roles such as Cat Ballou, Barbarella, and Bree Daniels, Fonda’s late seventies characters are unmemorable and amorphous, perhaps smaller than life. Out of the context, they

JANE FONDA

33

are nameless everywomen: Jane Harper, Sally Hyde, Ella Connors, Hannah Warren, Kimberly Wells, Hallie Martin. (Lillian Hellman in Julia is an obvious exception.) Fonda the woman remained preeminent, aided by the knowledge that she had exercised her growing power in the industry to shape these characters and projects. The scenario that mixed life with art also allowed Fonda to use her films to retroactively explain that her political activism was linked to her emotional growth rather than to political dogma. Throughout the seventies, Fonda had articulated the ways that her political education informed her acting. “Klute is my internal proof that when I developed a social and political conscience, I became a better actress. I developed an ability to understand and have compassion for the character. If I had not become a feminist, I wouldn’t have had those same feelings” (Sheff 126). Whereas celebrity discourses often efface the work of acting to promote the glamour of stardom, Fonda displaced her intellectual work onto emotional capaciousness. As she drew upon Lee Strasberg’s Method as a model for work and life, Fonda repeatedly minimized the labor implied by her engagement with history and political ideas as well as the honing of her acting skills. She frequently presented herself as a person drawn to causes, not through an intellectual framework, but through experiences. And, if her art was mixed with life, the kinds of changes that her characters in her late seventies films experienced could be achieved by anyone; other people didn’t need to have the extraordinary experiences, talent, or pedigree that Fonda had. Some have described Fonda’s roles in this period as alter egos rather than characters. Gilbert Adair wrote that after Fonda’s Sally Hyde, a proper officer’s wife in the Vietnam veteran saga Coming Home, learns to unwind, becoming less uptight, she “allows her hair to adopt its natural frizz. In short, she turns into Jane Fonda” (italics in original; 106). Tessa Perkins argues that Fonda’s late seventies characters seemed to draw directly from her biography because they move toward radicalism with guidance from men (247). What Fonda’s women learn in these films generally corresponds to her well-publicized offscreen political interests: they learn to question and confront the military and corporate power that lurks as the dark underside of capitalism (especially in Comes a Horseman, The China Syndrome, and Electric Horseman). In Coming Home, Sally witnesses the debilitating effects of war and learns from Vietnam vets, and particularly from her lover Luke (Jon Voight), about the inhumanity of a system that refuses to take responsibility for healing the damaged bodies and psyches it has created. In Comes a Horseman, Fonda’s Ella Connors learns to work cooperatively with the partner she never wanted, Buck (James Caan). In The China Syndrome and Electric

34

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

Horseman, Fonda’s characters grow beyond their own selfish ambition: they acquire knowledge of the corruption of large corporations and must own up to the fact that their desire to succeed in business may carry them beyond ethical bounds. Although her characters learn from men, nearly all of the romantic couplings are doomed. These characters can be difficult, grating, even stri-

Fonda revisits and redeems father Henry’s screen persona as brittle rancher Ella Conners in Comes a Horseman (Alan J. Pakula, United Artists, 1978). Personal collection of Maria Pramaggiore.

JANE FONDA

35

dent women. Only Jane Harper in Fun with Dick and Jane and Ella Connors in Comes a Horseman manage to sustain heterosexual relationships. Initially, Lillian in Julia and Sally in Coming Home are partnered with men, yet the former participates in a stormy relationship that rages on for decades, and the latter has a marriage threatened by a separation. California Suite’s Hannah, a divorced, neurotic overachiever, decides she can live without her teenaged daughter (who has run away to live with her father), and returns home to a boyfriend who is never shown onscreen. Hallie Martin in The Electric Horseman and Kimberly Wells in The China Syndrome remain single and childless. For many critics, these characters seem to conform to a too neat, selfreferential pattern of development. In the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris described Fonda’s performance in The China Syndrome in these terms: “As in Coming Home, the character she plays must inevitably be awakened from a long sleep of superficiality. She has not really become this character so much as she has commented upon her” (“The California Syndrome,” 19 March 1979, 45). But before attributing to Fonda a conscious turn from The Method to Brecht, it’s critical to examine more closely how Fonda’s persona emerges from—and how the persona of her father inhabits—her late seventies films.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Becoming Jane, Via Henry

An important aspect of Fonda’s late seventies films has been woefully neglected: her characters reconfigure the father-daughter dyad by internalizing the father figure. At the outset of these films, Fonda’s characters possess traits associated with Henry’s star persona. They are naive, socially awkward, plain-spoken, dry, stiff-necked, and frequently humorless. Because these traits are inflected with gender expectations, the ambitious newspaperwoman Hallie is presented as a bitchy, scheming, and strident reporter in The Electric Horseman. She isn’t afraid to press washedup cowboy Sonny Steele (Robert Redford) about his fall from the heights of rodeo fame and his subsequent career as a shill for a breakfast cereal. Rancher Ella Connors in Comes a Horseman is a practically autistic, sunburned virago who trusts no one but the faded ranch hand Dodger (Richard Farnsworth). These characters re-embody Fonda’s father physically and reactivate his star text and his offscreen persona, because they cannot sustain emotional connections with other people. Salient examples of emotionally stunted characters that Henry Fonda portrayed include the genteel Preston Dillard

36

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

from Jezebel (1938), the hapless Charles Pike from The Lady Eve (1941), Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946), and Lt. Col. Owen Thursday in Fort Apache (1948). Dillard and Thursday in particular reveal the way that Henry, as Donald R. Katz remarked in Rolling Stone, “embodied for an entire nation all of those qualities that are American and middle class and good: pride, honesty, tenacity, and a total sublimation of emotions” (“Jane Fonda: A Hard Act to Follow,” 9 March 1979, 40). Jane Fonda’s characters refuse to bow to the demand to sublimate emotions, however; their process of emotional opening becomes the centerpiece of their films. In a narrative that might seem counterintuitive from a feminist perspective, Fonda’s women learn about feelings from men; they learn to trust men. Hannah learns from her laid-back and sensitive ex-husband (Alan Alda) that she must let go of her daughter in order to gain her love and respect. Lillian Hellman witnesses bravery in her friend Julia, who devotes her fortune and sacrifices her life to help people escape Nazi Germany, but she also learns from her lover Dashiel Hammett about letting go of her grief over Julia. In Comes a Horseman—the revisionist western deserving reappraisal in light of the canonical McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and such recent entrants as There Will Be Blood (2007)—Buck’s tacit acceptance of Ella helps to release her guilt about her past involvement with her father’s archenemy, J. W. Ewing, played to leering perfection by Jason Robards. In this film, Fonda dances with Caan in a virtual restaging of the dance scene from her father’s celebrated triumph, My Darling Clementine. The fragmented conflation of Henry and Jane haunted Fonda’s star text through the seventies; at this stage, the gender trouble emanates not only from the casting of daddy versus daughter but also from Jane’s gradual but readily apparent acquisition of Henry’s physicality. Whereas Fonda’s nearcontemporaries, Marlon Brando and James Dean, spoke with a “bodily eloquence rooted in sexuality, especially in conflicting masculine-feminine, masochistic-sadistic motivations” (Williams 493), her father’s bodily eloquence was seated in a tight, springy elegance that contrasted sharply with the languorous feline grace of Brando or the cocksure slouch of Dean, or even the practiced nonchalance of Marilyn Monroe. Unlike her father, Brando, or Dean—but in concert with Monroe— Fonda’s eloquence was also verbal; her body routinely competed for attention with her garrulousness, generating conflicting masculine-feminine motivations. Fonda’s low, rounded, and accent-free voice was a vehicle for seduction and aggressiveness, most obviously in Klute, but also in Coming Home, where Luke admires her sputtering anger at how the other officers’ wives neglect veterans. As journalist Hallie Martin in The Electric Horseman,

JANE FONDA

37

she channels Rosalind Russell from His Girl Friday (1940) as she begs for an exclusive: “Can’t you just do a working girl a favor? I’m trying to tell an honest tale; make an honest buck.” Television reporter Kimberly Wells in The China Syndrome is renowned for her ability to fill airtime with amusing patter. Fonda seemed to have few compunctions about sounding “unfeminine” or unpleasant; in Julia she bellows and wails her way through writer’s block and, in The Electric Horseman, having tracked Sonny and his purloined thoroughbred to the wild west in her fashion boots from Bloomingdale’s, Hallie ironically bleats out an off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Fonda’s lush, resonant, and sometimes grating voice tended to clash with her lithe and controlled body. Often praised for its attractiveness, her long-limbed body also possessed a faint rigidity, as if her major joints performed all the work of generating movement, leaving her arms and legs to swing and dangle. Her strikingly erect posture may have been inherited from Henry, or it may represent her years of ballet training. Whatever the reason, Fonda in the late seventies recalled her father as she stood with a painfully upright carriage, her rib cage raised, legs held back and upper body leaning forward slightly from the waist. She appears in this stance as a toddler and child in two photographs published in her autobiography (45, 52) and in a third in a key biography (Andersen 98). Fonda walks nearly on pointe, carefully tapping the balls of her feet on the ground. Like Henry, who perfected an effortless glide even as his long legs were visible in motion, Jane Fonda’s gait is never stiff or lumbering; she moves lightly, strong and flexible as a bird. (As usual, the exception here is Julia, where Fonda leads with her head and shoulders, bobbing and weaving from side to side, her heavier footfalls conjuring up Hellman’s grounded physicality.) These descriptions of Fonda’s physicality in her films of the seventies suggest some of the ways that the father’s “tall and taciturn, twangy and touchy” lankiness, in the words of Madeline Monnet writing in the New York Column (“Jane Fonda,” 17 May 1972, 4), began to emerge uncannily from his daughter’s body, although an additional coiled energy and quick, defensive nervousness are Jane’s attributes alone. The problematic relationship of similarity and difference that was externalized as a naughty sexual tension between Fonda and her father figures in the early seventies morphed into something else entirely in these films, perhaps as Fonda, now over forty, moved beyond the range of Hollywood’s normative heterosexual desirability. Fonda’s post-1977 characters internalize Henry psychologically and physically in ways that offer a more acceptable visual image and narrative trajectory for the father-daughter pairing.

38

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

Jane Fonda’s late seventies characters engage in a political education by learning from others, exhibiting bravery, and speaking out. But they also develop trust, and learn to care and to participate in community. These characters thus embody a wish-fulfillment scenario for Fonda fans and for second-wave feminists—whose role models, after all, were their fathers— wherein the emotionally frozen father is redeemed by the daughter who has inherited his staunchness, but who can embrace intimacy and express emotions in a way that he couldn’t. Although Fonda shocked fans with her abrupt transition from sixties pin-up girl to seventies radical, the most controversial element of her political image and her film persona in the seventies was her bid to “feminize” American political culture. She sought to challenge American imperialism in Vietnam as an activist, not by engaging in political pragmatics, but by displacing masculine values of independence and autonomy with a feminist perspective that privileged empathy and emotion. She attributed her political and emotional education to men—to the intellectuals from the movement and the vulnerable GIs—foregrounding her paternal identification. (It is not until Nine to Five that Fonda’s character learns to trust women.) In the early years of the decade, the crossed circuits of gender and sexuality were framed within a discourse of incestuous desire and sexual domination that relied heavily upon Fonda’s biography. By the late seventies, Fonda actively conflated her roles with her offscreen persona while subtly reconciling the father-daughter dynamic that defined her from the outset. ■

■

■

Jane Fonda presents a fascinating case study for the historical trajectory of post-studio movie stardom. In the early seventies, her foray into politics suggested just how far the model of celebrity could expand beyond the confines of the entertainment industry. Discourses surrounding her political activities coalesced around her sixties film stardom and her Hollywood biography to produce the compelling image of the rebellious, easily manipulated, daughter whose need for discipline tested the boundaries of paternalchild relations. By the late seventies, however, Fonda consolidated her image as a film producer whose projects reflected her politics—privileging the star over particular films and over cinema as a social institution. Through her film roles, Fonda was no longer seen as a naughty child who battled her father, but as a strong woman who embraced and internalized his limitations and vulnerabilities as the starting point for her characters’ journeys to self-realization.

2 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Robert Redford and Warren Beatty Consensus Stars for a Post-Consensus Age CHRIS CAGLE

Two moments from two separate films reveal how much seventies Hollywood presented its often-confused political critiques in personalized terms. The Way We Were (1973) weaves a romance between leftist activist Katie (Barbra Streisand) and privileged collegiate jock Hubbell (Robert Redford). In their first direct encounter, Katie quips, “Look who’s here, America the beautiful.” The narrative will continue this connection between Hubbell/Redford’s looks and his White Anglo-Saxon Protestant 39

40

CHRIS CAGLE

social conformity. The second moment takes place in a crucial scene in Shampoo (1975), in which Lester (Jack Warden) confronts George (Warren Beatty): “What? You get your kicks sneaking around other people’s backs, taking advantage of them? Is that your way of being anti-Establishment?” “I’m not anti-Establishment,” George replies, baffled. These two exchanges slyly encapsulate the themes of their respective films, but they do more. They locate the realm of the national and the political in the arena of the physical and sexual, since these characters’ desirability overlaps with their relation to a dominant culture or its countercultural alternative. Moreover, in these moments the narratives hint at the star images behind the characters. In a more direct sense than usual, the dialogue is as much about Redford and Beatty as about the characters they play. The symmetry between these scenes suggests a kinship between these two stars’ images. Despite the differences between two distinct images, Beatty and Redford had overlapping careers in key areas. First, they were both quintessential stars of a long decade stretching from hits in the late sixties to capstone performances in the early eighties, so they stood as true contemporaries, with the seventies defining each in the public eye. While Redford made more films and had the stronger box office pull in the decade (Cook 339), both filled the niche of stars who combined sex symbol stature, respectable (if not profound) acting ability, and top-tier box-office draw. Popular press critics and journalists frequently pointed out these characteristics and tried to reconcile them. Second, both men sustained careers alternating generic entertainment with politicized “auteur” films; their appearance in a cycle of paranoid conspiracy thrillers suggests further a sympathy of star image. Third, both eventually became politicized producer-auteurs themselves, a development that formed a key part of their public personae. As The Way We Were and Shampoo reveal, the tension between being “allAmerican” and “anti-Establishment” permeates and defines the star images of Beatty and Redford. Aspects of their seventies star personae—both in their films and in the wider reception—either derive from this tension or feed it. Stardom often reconciles opposite traits (Dyer, Stars). Beatty and Redford’s roles and images reconciled cultural traits and, through those traits, a historical and political chasm between postwar liberal consensus and post-1968 political crisis. Time and again, Redford and Beatty approached crisis from the vantage of their earlier screen images, of their aura of social privilege, and of New Frontier liberalism. For each, looks and sexual appeal fought against a more serious, political self, yet appearance also enabled the expression of a particular seventies liberalism. They were, in short, consensus stars for an age of crisis.

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

41

Whereas political consensus characterized the two decades after World War II, as has often been remarked, various social, economic, and political crises cast a pall on the seventies. In some respects, this narrative of dramatic decline and collapse was illusory, since the ostensibly heady postwar years also saw plenty of social and political conflict, while elements of postwar consensus remained through the seventies. Historians are quick to remind us that changes are never sudden or total; James Patterson, for one, reminds readers of the consolidations of the seventies, noting, “Those years witnessed the strengthening of many trends already in the making” (Restless Giant 14). Furthermore, crisis narratives have the danger of imagining the immediate postwar years as conflict-free while overplaying a later negative mood as crisis. Nevertheless, a widespread perception did hold sway that the seventies were a troubled decade marked by deep social and political crises. Popularly, crisis refers merely to the severity of a negative social condition. Alternately, the word can signal the utter collapse of a social system. However, the experience of the seventies—when, notably, public and private institutions did not collapse—points to a more specific definition of crisis as social disequilibrium, a condition in which formerly stable relations become unsustainable while alternative relations have not taken their place. Across several areas, as we will see, political consensus collapsed without a clear successor. At the same time, Hollywood itself underwent key reorientations that threatened the loss of its own cultural authority. In negotiating the contradictions of their own star images within these contexts, Beatty and Redford emerged in many ways as quintessential stars for the new era.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Beatty and Redford Personae

The image and appeal of most major stars are multifaceted, and Warren Beatty and Robert Redford are no exception. What is surprising, however, is the complexity underlying the images of these matinee idol/sex symbol stars. In fact, the disparity between the lightweight “star” and the more serious “person” structures how these men were presented and received. Contemporary observers noticed and remarked on the “bundle of contradictions known as Robert Redford” (Wendell Davidson, “What Makes Robert Redford Run?” Saturday Evening Post, May 1977, 42), or a Warren Beatty who was “a millionaire many times over but lives in two small, slovenly kept hotel rooms” (Frank Rich, “Warren Beatty Strikes Again,” Time, 2 July 1978, 70). This journalistic conceit sets magazine feature writers up to expose the “real Robert Redford” or the “real Warren Beatty,” but

42

CHRIS CAGLE

at the same time reveals a base star image flexible enough to accommodate a range of traits. These traits have ideological implications but are worth considering in their own right. The dominant facet of their star images was all-Americanness. This idea—and ideal—is notably ideological in implying that certain Americans are truer to national purity than others, often on the basis of racial, ethnic, or religious allegiance. In short, “all-American” signals in turn whiteness, Protestantism, “middle-class” (that is, petit bourgeois, old or new) values, and Middle American regionality. Beatty’s and Redford’s personae carried these meanings, with varied emphasis. Physiognomy was important in both star constructions. Repeatedly, observers in the popular press write as if the star’s body, features, or face is so striking that a comparison to some all-American ideal was unavoidable. A New York Times profile of Beatty notes “his Pacific blue eyes” and “teeth that are whiter than white” (Judy Klemesrud, “Warren Beatty—Back Where He Belongs?” 17 March 1974, 40), and debate arose on whether Redford’s straw-blond hair was natural or bleached (see Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “The Riddle of Robert Redford,” McCall’s, May 1977, 43). “There are many things gorgeous about Robert Redford,” began a 1974 Newsweek cover story. “The shell, to begin with, is resplendent. The head is classically shaped, the features chiseled to an all-American handsomeness just rugged enough to avoid prettiness, the complexion weather burnished to a reddish gold, the body athletically muscled, the aura best described by one female fan who says: ‘He gives you the feeling that even his sweat would smell good’” (Charles Michener, “The Great Redford,” 4 February 1974, 44). The lead captures so much of Redford’s “all-American” image, namely his athleticism, his sex appeal, and his unthreatening wholesomeness. Regionally, their personae signaled Midwestern and Western provenance, furthering the connotations of “all-Americanness.” Warren Beatty was born and raised in Virginia, yet his films never typed him in the southern Gothic mold so prevalent in fifties and sixties dramas. Instead, his slight twang and vocal flatness could signify Midwestern or Californian roots and bring to his roles (say, the banker in $ [1971]) a generic “American” type. His down-to-earth demeanor formed the basis of his quarterback character Joe Pendleton in Heaven Can Wait (1978) and particularly his “American first” socialist John Reed in Reds (1981). (Reviewing the latter, Richard Corliss in Time contrasts a figurative “tundra of Russian ice against Reed’s all-American fire” [7 December 1981, 66].) Robert Redford, originally from Santa Monica, California, eventually became associated with the American West, but his accent, demeanor, and appearance equally contributed to

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

43

Midwestern roles, as in The Sting (1973), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), and The Natural (1984). The preponderance of “Joe” and “John” among Redford and Beatty character names further suggests their regular, even generic, aura. Redford’s image straddled two competing class definitions, the “normal” and the “privileged.” The “normal” was middle-American and petit bourgeois, and periodicals portrayed him as a “family man” or “nice, normal married sex symbol” (see Kandi Stroud, “Weekend with Robert Redford,” Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1974, 80). The upstanding nature of many of his characters, as in Brubaker (1980) or A Bridge Too Far (1977), relied on the “ordinary” class milieu of previous roles like This Property Is Condemned (1966) or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). At other times, Redford’s image exuded upper-class or “blue blood” Protestant lineage. Although he was not from a wealthy background, his roles implied social privilege. His WASP turn in The Way We Were treats Hubbell Gardner (and Redford himself) as a foil for the Jewishness and political engagement of Barbra Streisand’s Katie Morosky. The Candidate (1972) follows Redford’s Bill McKay, son of a California governor and now caught in a senatorial race defined both by and against his establishment father. Reprising the struggling professional milieu of Barefoot in the Park (1967), Redford’s Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men (1976) implies the journalists’ social connections and class background. The publicity surrounding the film mentions Redford/Woodward’s “cool, assured WASP” (“‘Lights . . . Action’: Watergate Thriller Turns into $6 Million Film,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 1975, 17) and his “casual, corduroy-clad grace” (Jack Kroll, “Behind the Front Page,” Newsweek, 5 April 1976, 85). In each of these appearances, wardrobe choices carry the actor’s WASP image offscreen and on: Redford/ Woodward’s tattersall preppiness, The Great Gatsby’s closet of tailored shirts, or the textured wool sweaters of publicity photographs. Taking the “all-American” trope to its logical conclusion, Beatty and Redford converge in the athleticism of their image. Both played competitive sports in their adolescence (Beatty football, Redford baseball) and attended university on athletic scholarships, only to drop out. Biographical profiles tended to play up their athletic history, even though neither excelled in sports in the way that publicity would suggest (Amburn). The many films casting them as athletes reinforced the mythological biography. Beatty played a star quarterback in Heaven Can Wait, while Redford’s roles also stressed his athleticism or his abilities as a competitor: a motorcycle racer (Little Fauss and Big Halsy [1970]); a barnstorming pilot (The Great Waldo Pepper [1975]); and a former rodeo competitor (The Electric Horseman [1979]).

44

CHRIS CAGLE

Redford’s athleticism on display in The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, Columbia Pictures, 1973). Personal collection of James Morrison.

The association was even stronger in the star publicity surrounding them. Newsweek remarked on “the aura of the athlete about Robert Redford” (Jack Kroll, “Redford’s Second Debut,” 22 September 1980, 76). Magazines related anecdotes of Redford playing tennis, insisting on touch football games on set, and even diving: “Good at everything, Robert Redford, super skier, razzle-dazzle racing driver and jogging juggernaut, became a champion-class motorcyclist after only one twenty-minute lesson and two days of practice” (Wendell Davidson, “What Makes Robert Redford Run?” Saturday Evening Post, May 1977, 42). Athletics become a metaphor, as one article compared the interview to a tennis volley (“‘Lights . . . Action’: Watergate Thriller Turns into $6 Million Film,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 1975, 16). Sexual appeal frequently forms the basis of stars’ popularity; what distinguished the Beatty and Redford images was their representation of sex appeal in an age of sexual liberation and shifting gender politics. In short, Beatty’s image assumed a liberationist aura, while Redford’s was the “new male” ideal. Moreover, as “sex symbols,” they embodied the “pretty” looks akin to matinee idols but held the heft of major stars.

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

45

For Redford, the “golden boy” image combined his class, ethnic, and national image. Observers referred often to the star’s sheer desirability: “What seems to have thrown his fans into total erotic disarray . . . was a picture that appeared recently in a newspaper: Redford, stripped to the waist. . . . You call [those deltoids] ripping sex” (M. W. Lear, “Anatomy of a Sex Symbol,” New York Times Magazine, 7 July 1974, 8). This ostensible sexuality, however, was notably unthreatening, a neutralization that his roles often played upon, whether through Hubbell Gardiner’s gentlemanly treatment of women or the idiosyncratic bright smile that the actor would flash at moments of narrative tension (for example, the climactic moment in The Sting). “Safe” sexuality had been the hallmark of certain classical Hollywood images (Meyer 265), and Redford’s star image reconciled this safeness to changing gender politics of the time. One writer in Mademoiselle invoked a defensive posture—a knowingness about why urban, upper-middle-class women should seem to be above lusting after Redford while actively doing so: “Liking Robert Redford tends to suggest that one is . . . full of secret cravings for domesticity (he’s so nice and so nicely married . . . ),” (Karen Dubbin, “American Crush,” June 1976, 121). McCall’s considered Redford “a tabula rasa . . . malleable clay for the viewer’s fantasies”; the article relates a Ms. magazine editor’s anecdote of Redford walking by the office suite: “Here we were turning out a magazine about sexual politics, and every time America’s favorite male sex symbol came through the office, we’d stop dead in our tracks” (“The Riddle of Robert Redford,” McCall’s, May 1977, 44). At the same time, Redford supported the Equal Rights Amendment and the women’s movement in general, and his pro-feminist politics contributed to an updated sex symbol image. If Redford was safe, Beatty’s image evoked potent bachelor sexuality, defined by his presumed desirability, prowess, and libido. A typed sexualized masculinity informed his image in the seventies: “Ever since he made his sensational screen debut in Splendor in the Grass, the 6-foot-1-inch former high school football star has had the reputation of being something of a cad with the ladies” (“Warren Beatty—Back Where He Belongs?” New York Times, 17 March 1974, 15). Interviewers asked the star directly about his sex symbol image, while biographers chronicled his presumed sexual exploits, and one write-up quipped that the star had “an address book Don Juan would envy” (Frank Rich, “Warren Beatty Strikes Again,” Time, 2 July 1978, 70). Thus, Beatty’s image combined screen presence, gossip-as-biography, and press reactions into a mélange of salacious characterizations. Shampoo, notoriously, begins with a ringing phone interrupting George (Beatty) during a bout of sex. The story of this womanizing Beverly Hills hairdresser plays off

46

CHRIS CAGLE

Beatty’s reputation and suggests a parallel between his onscreen romance and his offscreen involvement with Julie Christie. Reds thematizes sexual liberation through its characters’ own radicalism and Greenwich Village bohemianism. In films such as these, not only was Beatty coded as a sexual being and a sexual object, but the politics of his persona also matched a personal-is-political sexual libertinism.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Outlaw Hero and the Rugged Individual

Both Beatty and Redford began as heartthrob stars, but each later took roles that juxtaposed an outlaw status with their looks and thereby complicated their overall image. This new complexity heightened their popularity and elevated the actors’ star status, leading each into a new career phase that would last through the seventies. The figure of the outlaw in turn became the means for expressing other elements of their star image, such as their anti-Establishment or more generally political aspects. In Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965), Warren Beatty had played a criminal on the run from organized crime, but 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde successfully redefined his image as the likable criminal and outsider. Beatty would continue in similar roles, especially in his heist films like The Only Game in Town (1970) and $ (1971). In McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), his character John McCabe is a gambler and illegitimate businessman in the lawless American West, a setting that the film uses, subversively, to overturn the generic conventions and manifest-destiny ideology of the traditional western. As with Beatty, Redford’s early roles in The Chase (1966) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid solidified a new synthesis of his outlaw and the existing golden-boy images. Indeed, “the Sundance Kid” became Redford’s new moniker, and the outlaw-hero a new part of his acting repertoire. The Hot Rock (1972) cast him in the popular heist genre, mixing comedy with the base genre. The Sting reprised the Paul Newman–Redford pairing as two con men who stage an elaborate fake betting parlor to snare an unsuspecting gambler. Transferring the outlaw figure to Redford the person, Liz Smith notes, “The Hot Rock, The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper, The Great Gatsby, and Three Days of the Condor [1975] all appealed to Redford’s sense of being a rebel and an outlaw” (“Robert Redford’s Many Roles,” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1976, 86). As Smith’s list suggests, the Sundance Kid template informed very different kinds of roles for Redford through the decade, even to the point of eliciting critical complaints. Both stars have repeatedly been linked to classic images of the rugged individualist in back-to-the-land fantasies of communion with nature. While

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

47

Beatty as outlaw in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, Warner Bros., 1971). Personal collection of James Morrison.

Beatty has more sporadically been associated with the natural element, it is Redford whose conservationist and environmentalist politics define key aspects of his public image. Two actions outside his films helped cement this image at the start of the decade. First was his purchase of land in the rural West, including in Utah, where he built a solar- and wind-powered house (Louise Sweeney, “Robert Redford, Environmentalist, Speaks Out,” Christian Science Monitor, 11 June 1975, 19). Second was his high-profile political advocacy, such as his active campaigning for Utah’s Democratic congressional representative Wayne Owens on explicitly conservationist grounds. Both took place at the same time as Redford appeared in The Candidate playing an environmentalist lawyer, who campaigns to protect the watershed and stages a political photo opportunity at a polluted California beach. Indeed, his increasingly political roles gave him a chance to use the normal promotional routine as a springboard for political statement. Whether as personal biography or as ambient image, Redford’s environmentalism squared with his association with the American West, a link that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid cemented. Jeremiah Johnson (1972) marked the full birth of the environmentalist image from the western role. A

48

CHRIS CAGLE

deceptively simple, internal narrative, the film follows Jeremiah on a journey through the wilderness, trying to live a life of solitude but caught up in a battle for revenge between Anglo-American settlers and Native American inhabitants of the rural West. The film’s slow, quasi-modernist pacing highlighted contemplative cinematography of Redford’s character in the natural setting of Utah. Reviews tended to respond well to Redford’s new star turn: “He is no boy skipping merrily to the tune of a ballad’s promise. His hands are calloused and he has come through a way he will not talk about” (Milton Krims, “Jeremiah Johnson: Mountain Man,” Saturday Evening Post, Winter 1972, 131). Just as Redford has aged from boyishness to maturity, the review implies, so has his star image grown up. The Electric Horseman, coming at the end of the decade, reinforced the trope of environmentalism as frontier life. Show horseman Sonny Steele comes to realize that he has moved too far from his rural roots and kidnaps his horse, now a corporate mascot, in a move with clear environmentalist symbolism. Beatty’s “rugged individualism” tended to manifest itself in urban spaces, though typically with explicit political overtones. Reds, an ambitious film that is a throwback to the seventies in its New Hollywood synthesis of the historical film and revisionist genre, was the pinnacle of the public and political persona Beatty developed during this decade. It traces an alternate history of the Left in the personal story of radical journalist John Reed (Beatty) and his partner, feminist dilettante Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Their personal story is juxtaposed against the sweep of the Russian Revolution, while documentary interviews with surviving members of the Old Left shift the focus to introspection about the historical memory of politics. The implicit thematic question of the film is, “What if the leftist tradition in the United States had been allowed to continue, even thrive?” In framing this question, the film uses the past to reflect upon a political crossroads for late seventies America, with the potential exhaustion and defeat of leftist critique. To be sure, the film came at the end of a decade-long series of films questioning dominant political beliefs and institutions. Even if Beatty’s image was more associated with radicalism and Redford’s with liberalism, in practice both pursued similar kinds of political commitments. Beatty’s support for Democratic senator and presidential nominee George McGovern was deeply committed and raised his profile, leading to articles on his new “political role” (Roland Flamini, “Warren Beatty’s Political Role,” Harper’s Bazaar, November 1972, 20). As to Redford, one magazine had Ralph Nader and the actor interview each other (K. D. Fury, “Ralph Nader and Robert Redford,” Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1975, 44). In short, Redford and Beatty carved out political positions and, with them, political images.

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

49

Often, these associations could be superficial, as in the ascription to both of them of a hipness that had only the aura of the countercultural. The Candidate, for instance, depicts the cutting of Bill McKay’s sideburns as an act of political mainstreaming. Beatty’s libertine hairdresser in Shampoo draws extensively from this anti-establishment lifestyle coding, which forms a central part of its allegorical resonance. The Parallax View (1974) calls attention to his antitraditional grooming when a small-town deputy taunts the long-haired, snugly dressed Joseph Frady: “You know there, for a minute I thought you were a man. But you aren’t, are you?” “Don’t touch me unless you love me,” Frady answers in a sardonic deadpan. Beatty and Redford drew energy from new social movements and the New Left and expressed their politics in part through a young, “hip” lifestyle sensibility.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Politicized Actor-Producer Auteur

Redford’s and Beatty’s political bent both fed and bled into an intellectual image, subtending their political postures. Both men were associated with a cosmopolitan education, including time spent in Europe and in the cultural capital of New York City. Liz Smith called the “sportsloving outdoor type . . . a thoughtful ‘cannibal for knowledge’” (5), and Ladies’ Home Journal profiled Redford as “an easy conversationalist,” “his remarks peppered with literary allusions, references to magazines and newspaper articles (he holds Harper’s on his lap), statistics, French names, quotes. . . .” (Robert Woodward, “Weekend with Robert Redford,” October 1974, 80). Such depictions of the “real” Redford or Beatty contrasted with the “ordinary” or “jock” dimensions of their image. “More than a pretty face,” Rolling Stone’s 1980 cover proclaimed of Redford, the accompanying photo showing the now bespectacled star reclining less in a beefcake pose (the inviting and “unobserved” stance [see Dyer, “Don’t Look Now”; Meyer) than in direct, serious communication with the spectator (Robert M. Rogers, “Robert Redford,” 2 October 1980, 38–41). Crucial roles sprang directly from this aspect of their images. In Three Days of the Condor, Redford’s Joseph Turner is a reader for the CIA who knows several languages and whose military training has given him a working competence in electronics. Even his jewel thief in The Hot Rock has a savant-like rigor to his approach. Beatty’s role as a talented and intellectual leftist journalist in Reds overlapped with the actor’s longstanding interest in and knowledge of history and politics, and from early in the decade, interviewers noted that the star preferred to talk politics over the subjects of films, acting, or stardom (“Warren Beatty—Back Where He Belongs?” New

50

CHRIS CAGLE

York Times, 17 March 1974). As both stars took on more public roles in producing and directing, the publicity and reception would emphasize their intellectual image. Neither star was noted for being a superlative actor, but each inhabited a niche combining decent acting ability with box-office clout. For this reason, critics were caught between seeing Beatty and Redford as actors and seeing them as cutout stars. As biographers Lawrence Quirk and William Schoell note, “Critics have always been divided over Redford’s acting skill, with some seeing him as a master of understatement and others thinking of him as wooden” (xi). Similarly, Beatty could inspire admiration and faint praise for modest acting success (Frank Rich, “Warren Beatty Strikes Again,” Time, 2 July 1978, 74). Such judgments varied, but for both stars physical appeal and star typecasting tainted their acting credibility. Over time, the stars’ reputation as actors increased as their star image gained complexity and a more actorly image. The New Yorker’s review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller indicates this shift: “It’s hard to know what makes Beatty such a magnetic presence; he was that even early in his screen career, when he used to frown and loiter over a line of dialogue as if he hoped to find his character during the pauses. Now that he has developed pace and control, he has become just about as attractive a screen star as any of the romantic heroes of the past” (Penelope Gilliatt, “The Current Cinema,” 3 July 1971, 40). Here, Beatty’s quality as an actor is inextricable from his star appeal since, like Redford, he was rarely seen as a self-effacing, transformative actor. At the same time, his seventies roles were consistently seen as improvements over his earlier work, signaling maturation across the decade. A similar fate met Redford, who could be seen as acting “more on élan than on ability” yet also as pushing past those limitations (David Sterritt, “Redford’s Latest,” Christian Science Monitor, 26 September 1975). As their images evolved, the emphasis on “actor” was built into the publicity itself, as in the coverage of All the President’s Men, which depicted Robert Redford as a dedicated study of Woodward and the journalistic profession in general, engaging in substantive research for the role (see, for example, “‘Lights . . . Action’: Watergate Thriller Turns into $6 Million Film,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 1975). Such publicity downplayed innate acting talent but cast him as a serious star, living up to the more complex roles in the Europeanized commercial cinema of the seventies. One pronounced industrial trend of seventies Hollywood was the rise of star power. David Cook argues that a decline in production and a premium on minimizing risk drove an emphasis on bankability; the result was the increased power of stars (349). With this power came new hybrid roles

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

51

of director, writer, or producer in addition to actor. By the end of the seventies, Beatty and Redford had public images defined by their producing and directing work as much as by their acting. The shift in public perception began in the mid-seventies, when the popular press remarked on these actors’ increasing work behind the camera. Time magazine dubbed Beatty “Mr. Hollywood” (Rich 71); more than any other star, he came to be tagged as an “industry player.” As producers and directors, Redford and Beatty eventually gained the professional respect and prestige that often eluded them as actors. For each, the role as auteur-producer was linked to that politicized image which stressed each man’s activist work and aspirations. Redford’s experience as a “superstar-activist” is particularly instructive. One biography, relating his attempts as producer to get The Candidate made, claims he “found himself in the humiliating position of having to shop the manuscript almost door to door, standing in the offices of disinterested movie executives who told him that political movies were dead—or too dangerous” (Quirk and Schoell 88). Whether this image as crusading producer was verifiable or exaggerated, Redford nurtured it, claiming “that the one aspect he was not overly concerned with was the financial side” (Mel Gussow, “Redford Now a Hollywood Hyphenate,” New York Times, 12 April 1976, 36). Despite the enhanced power that came with their roles as producer, both Beatty and Redford continued to project images of vulnerability. Amid the contradictions of their images, a split between the “self” and the “star” defined both. Stars tend to give performances that seem to emanate naturally from their image, and indeed many Redford or Beatty roles were seen this way. However, many observers increasingly saw a split between the star surface and the inner, hidden depth—or at least, the inner space where depths might be. Pauline Kael, for one, complained in the New Yorker, “There are no depths in Redford that he’s willing to reveal” (5 February 1971, 51). Others might be more positive, as in Roger Greenspun’s review of Jeremiah Johnson in the New York Times citing “a reticence and directness” at the core of Redford’s identity (“Robert Redford Stars as Man of Legend,” 22 December 1972, 23). Redford himself lamented “this golden image, this ‘Mr. Perfect’ B.S.” (Smith 164). His words evoke his character Jay Gatsby, who hides his angst behind the facade of success; or Hubbell Gardner, whose first short story (“The All-American Smile”) begins, “In a way, he was like the country he lived in. Everything came too easily to him, but at least he knew it.” Beatty, too, expressed discomfort at his bachelor reputation and was noted to be “shampooing away his X-rated image” (Alan Ebert, “Warren Beatty,” Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1976, 95). As typified in

52

CHRIS CAGLE

Shampoo and Reds, his roles centered on their characters’ identity crises and stunted emotions. This self/image split projected vulnerability as a defining trait of both stars’ seventies personae. Between the radiant and youthful confidence of the sixties star presence and the mature, reclusive professionalism of the eighties and beyond, the vulnerable persona suggested depths beneath the beauty and golden-boy charm. It gave both men a new political and intellectual resonance that made them emblematic of social contradictions and reconciliations of the time.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Consensus and Legitimation Crisis: Narratives of Reconciliation

The contradictions of these star images, reconciled or otherwise, were especially important for a wider historical gap they reflected, between consensus politics and crisis politics. Consensus historians of the years after World War II point to two related trends that began to strain during the seventies. First, from the ground up, a conservatism and stability in social mores generally flowed from a newfound economic prosperity. “Impressive as . . . economic statistics are,” James Patterson remarks, “they cannot convey the broader, though admittedly hard to quantify, sense of well-being that the majority of Americans were beginning to feel [in the post–World War II years]” (Grand Expectations 65). Meanwhile, from above, another consensus formed, one less directly about popular opinion or mores than about political and economic elites. Godfrey Hodgson writes of an “ideology of liberal consensus,” describing the narrowing of the political spectrum along the lines of certain tenets: free market capitalism combined with certain welfare state and “crisis management” measures; anticommunism at home and especially abroad; and an enlarged role of the state and corporate sector alike in fixing economic and cultural problems (67–74). Reflecting on similar issues, Jürgen Habermas offers the idea of a “legitimation crisis” to suggest that in the seventies the existing arrangement of democratic deliberation and acclamation of political power had broken down. In the United States, the postwar “imperial presidency” overstepped its constitutional powers, and Watergate tested the division of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Although the power of the executive branch was curbed, this was temporary at best (Patterson, Grand Expectations), but Watergate helped turn public opinion against the legitimacy of government (Lipset and Schneider).

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

53

Policy incoherence and failure deflated public confidence in governmental functioning. Inflation brought about by expansionary government spending, and recession brought about by skyrocketing oil prices, combined to create a new affliction: stagflation. A problem in itself, stagflation also confounded the received macroeconomic medicine of Keynesian fiscal policy. Moreover, for complex reasons, American economic productivity slowed from the rapid pace of the prosperous postwar years to more or less a flat line (French). Organized labor faced economic shortfall and political disadvantage. Whereas in the postwar years an oligopolistic industrial sector had managed to pass high productivity and price surplus off to wages, new conditions now weakened management-labor compromises (O’Connor). The apotheosis of this breakdown was Richard Nixon’s institution of price controls in 1971, and much of the crisis of the seventies was an inability to defer the class conflict that ensued when the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened starkly. Not coincidentally, the contrast between the postwar period of consensus and the seventies’ experience of crisis matched a contrast between Beatty’s and Redford’s early images and the classic period of their seventies stardom. The central contradictions defining their image—between the “all-American” and “anti-establishment” or between “golden boy” and “vulnerable”—resonated ideologically with a decade in which political institutions of the postwar consensus operated under the stress of political protest, economic strain, and lack of confidence. The ambient star image therefore has political meaning, but only in the films themselves did the actors’ star qualities take on full ideological significance. The way the Redford and Beatty films narrativized their characters brought out certain political meanings latent in their star images and deployed them to thematic ends. In particular, their explicitly political dramas, their depictions of con men in heist films, and their paranoid conspiracy films all deployed their star images as a means of what Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping” (Postmodernism 51)—that is, the allegorization of abstract, large-scale social relations. For Jameson, such cognitive mapping occurs in a dispersed field lacking reference points, in which formerly trusted institutions strive to reclaim authority, not by appealing to their former bases, but by mounting frantic strategies of self-legitimation, which leads to rampant social disorder. In short, cognitive mapping is a coping mechanism for an era of unstable foundations, in which individual subjects must make their way through sheer “cognition.” In this context, it is striking how the Beatty and Redford character type continues to operate amid the confusion and chaos, often through resourcefulness

54

CHRIS CAGLE

or intuition alone. Indeed, Beatty’s character in The Parallax View emerges as one of Jameson’s key examples in his definition of the term (Geopolitical Aesthetic 58).

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Political Film

Much of Beatty’s and Redford’s seventies output was marked as political in one way or another, but a subset of films were defined generically as political dramas or satires. They tend to fall into two types, depending on their approach to political and social matters. The social-problem films tackled a consequential issue and made at least one central dramatic or character conflict coterminous with a larger social conflict or political dilemma. As such, they had much in common with earlier social-problem films, even if in the New Hollywood they were less central in the industry’s prestige product. The problem film could be understood as the genre par excellence of liberal consensus, since, as Hodgson claims, one tenet of liberal consensus was that “Social problems can be solved like industrial problems: The problem is first identified; programs are designed to solve it . . . the problems will be solved” (76). These updated social-problem films usually introduced new political problems that spoke to crisis and the dissolution of the liberal supermajority. Meanwhile, the allegories commented on political turmoil through personal struggle. Leftist filmmakers in Hollywood had often used allegory, in part to disguise their politics in the context of a commercial, entertainment cinema. In a new development of the seventies, latent allegory could come to the surface, since a significant reading formation and receptive context valued these films for the larger political implications of their narratives. In general, Robert Redford hewed to the social-problem approach. Late in the decade, in The Electric Horseman, ex-rodeo competitor and corporate spokesman “Sonny” Steele realizes that he has lost a sense of himself. As he decides to return his horse to the wilderness, he gains the emotional honesty his formerly alcoholic self had abandoned. Furthermore, as he becomes a news story for his horse kidnapping, his actions become a consciousnessraising media event. Earlier, The Candidate follows Bill McKay’s accidental candidacy for U.S. Senate. He knows he is being set up to fail, but sees value in championing environmentalist causes and making a plea against a corrupt public sphere. As his campaign handlers and media packagers begin to reshape him, his popularity surges and he loses his sense of self. As a message film, The Candidate belongs to a lineage of postwar films treating the corruption of the public sphere as a political problem (All The King’s Men

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

55

[1949] or A Face in the Crowd [1957]). At the same time, its political crisis is more specific, since the Left is unable to achieve a credible candidate, given their electoral defeats in California. Bill McKay is a Democratic candidate whose more radical ideas are given free rein out of desperation, in the face of the collapse of consensus politics. He realizes at the same time that he can neither maintain his true idealistic self when confronted with the reality of power, nor can he reconcile new social movements to liberal establishment politics as he had hoped. The Redford vulnerability adds to the mix by casting a political crisis as a personality crisis. Beatty’s films, meanwhile, were more often allegories than explicit social-problem dramas. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is one of several films in which the contrast between criminal business and legitimate business got turned on its head. If classic westerns kept this equation latent, Robert Altman’s modernism brings it to the foreground. Beatty plays John McCabe, a gambler who comes to a rural Washington town to set up a brothel. Through the first two acts, McCabe is the unscrupulous illegitimate businessman, but the final part of the narrative shows him up as a naïve victim of the ruthless and organized commercial syndicate that is working to monopolize mining business in the town. Shampoo again offered Beatty as an unconventional and small-time businessman in the form of celebrity hairdresser George Roundy. The action subplot, such that it is, follows George’s attempt to get a loan for his business, leading him to plead with a banker and to approach the well-connected husband of his client/lover. Where the typical Redford problem-film role was characterized by epiphany, the typical Beatty role built toward a loss of personal identity and meaning. In Shampoo, the larger (and more psychological) subplot of George’s loss of identity adds a reflexive layer to the sex farce and social satire. This crisis of self takes place on the eve of the 1968 election, a crisis year for the American political system. Each of these films presents a narrative of loss and nostalgia. Usually this historical loss is a narrational problem; the psychological journey that the main character undergoes in Shampoo, Jeremiah Johnson, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, or The Candidate establishes the political theme, yet in the absence of a clear indication of psychology, the star image carries much of the films’ ideological import. This star image synthesized insider and outsider, with the Beatty or Redford character being both and neither. Since Beatty and Redford were producers of most of these, they may well have used the star image in this way to repurpose their public and screen personae. But whatever the cause, it suggested an inner vulnerability with a political resonance.

56

CHRIS CAGLE

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Confidence Artist

If the political films were explicitly political, or at least noticeably allegorical, the genre films featuring Redford and Beatty often posed subtextual political conflict on a different level. These films did not market themselves as political statements, yet they are consistently about power, privilege, and money. In the conflicts of their narratives, Redford and Beatty take on the role of the confidence man. Their ability as tricksters also speaks to a social distance between the character’s “true” self and his put-on self. In this way, their roles activate the vulnerability and the self/image split of their stardom and give it a social and political context. The specific narratological uses vary, but most of the scripts straddle liberal politics and leftist critique. Two heist films, $ and The Hot Rock, demonstrate the centrality of the con man as a figure of class transcendence and commentary. Of the two, $ is the most explicit commentary on capitalism. From its title to its high-concept nightclub scenes, the “greed corrupts” message is writ large. However, in between the high-concept scenes, the narrative adopts an approach between thematic directness and allegory. Joe Collins (Beatty) is an American security advisor for a German bank. Acting as an inside man, he plans a heist there, with his accomplice Dawn Devine (Goldie Hawn), faking a bombing threat and locking himself in the vault. Once locked in, he switches the contents of the safe deposit boxes. Much as the Keynesian welfare compact required that “each class must ‘take the role of the other’” (Offe 194), Collins uses his role in law enforcement to “take another role” and thereby circumvent detection. “To bank robbers!” he declares in a toast, “If we didn’t have thieves, we wouldn’t need banks.” Moreover, for both practical reasons (criminals are unable to report the crime) and moral legitimacy, he steals only the possessions of criminals who have been using the security boxes. In $, crime is as international as finance, and the Hamburg setting and the “dollars” high concept ideologically figure finance capitalism as itself equivalent to the criminal activity. The Hot Rock makes a similar statement. As in $, the narrative presents a triangular conflict, between the bank, the heist criminals, and competing criminals pursuing the same loot. Redford’s character John Dortmunder is a jewel thief released from prison and coaxed into pulling off the “next big heist.” As in other con films, scenarios of impersonation dominate the narrative and in the process present a simulacrum of current social conflicts. Dortmunder and his gang, for instance, impersonate police officers during one break-in into a prison, and their diversionary tear gas tricks the police

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

57

into thinking that radicals have laid siege to the station. Later, Dortmunder’s final act of the heist involves access to the security deposit box of the rival thieves. To accomplish it, he has to “go legit” and pose as a businessman. His entrance through the downtown bank lobby foregrounds the mise-en-scène of financial capitalism: its glass surfaces and marble modernist interiors frame Redford’s performance of a performance. As Erving Goffman argues, the confidence artist is reviled because she or he reveals the performance behind all social interactions (Goffman 1959). Through transformative moments like these, the film defamiliarizes social class and subtly suggests the Proudhonian theme of $, namely that under finance capitalism, property itself is always and already theft. Other films of the decade draw on the con man persona to similar ends. In The Sting, Johnny Hooker (Redford) moves from being a smalltime grifter to pulling off a major con on a Chicago businessman and organized crime leader (Robert Shaw). The narrative constantly toys with the unknowability of the dividing line between criminality and legitimacy. Similarly, The Great Gatsby (1974) depicts its title character as a charlatan capitalist and trades on Redford’s “golden boy” synthesis of “middle America” and “privilege.” The character of Jay Gatsby, a nouveau riche Gilded Age aristocrat, is the book’s central enigma and, in the film adaptation also, the tragic figure of a man whose class mobility conceals a hollow interior. However, although narrator Nick Caraway (Sam Waterston) observes Gatsby and provides some of the film’s voiceover narration, it is largely Redford’s performance and image that must carry the characterization. Heaven Can Wait offers its own version of class transcendence: through the magical interference of an angel, quarterback Joe Pendleton (Beatty), assumes the body of a deceased industrialist and begins to run “his” corporate concerns with a new, enlightened management style. These roles show that across genre and property, the films call into question the legitimacy of business and the economic order.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Paranoid Conspiracy Cycle

If the political films present a social message explicitly, and the genre films offer a more diffuse representation of social conflict, the cycle of “paranoid conspiracy films” lies somewhere in between. Made in the middle of the decade, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President’s Men use the thriller formula to suggest the omnipotent power of a government and economic system without checks or countervailing power. Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View follows Joseph Frady (Beatty),

58

CHRIS CAGLE

who gradually discovers that more was behind a recent assassination than meets the eye. His investigation leads him to the Parallax Corporation, a front for an assassination bureaucracy. A cat-and-mouse narrative pushes Frady deeper into the danger of becoming an assassin himself—and getting killed. Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor has a similar dual-chase structure, with Redford’s Joseph Turner as a CIA reader on the run after his unit is gunned down. He uncovers a “CIA within the CIA,” tied to rogue American foreign policy interests in the Middle East. Finally, in Pakula’s All the President’s Men elements of the paranoid thriller are applied to the Watergate break-in story and the Washington Post’s role in investigating it. Where the historical events are largely from the public record, All the President’s Men focuses on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation and on the menace of detection, threat, and surveillance. These films—Pakula’s especially, but Pollack’s as well—yoke modernist narrative ambiguity and Hitchcockian thriller construction to the topical material of assassination, abuse of power, and domestic surveillance. Yet, while the films are nominally about assassination and covert intelligence, they are also about the unknowable locus of power and use formally rigorous spatial construction—as in the abstract corporate landscapes of The Parallax View, for example—as a correlative to social spaces in the contemporary United States. Like its purer genre cousins, the thrillers allegorize the economic order. For these reasons, argues Jameson, “The economic organization of multinational capitalism is in the conspiracy form conveyed by the shifting shapes of power” (Geopolitical Aesthetic 67). The unfolding of the enigma in each film relies on the protagonist’s original state of naïveté. Turner is a low-level operative who does not suspect the power play he stumbles on. Frady believes Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) is delusional because of her conspiracy fears. Woodward initially cannot fathom the Nixon administration’s full involvement in Watergate and only broadens his scope at Deep Throat’s urging. In each of the conspiracy thrillers, the consensus worldview (institutions can be trusted) gives way to a crisis worldview (neither news nor officials are capable of revealing the true operation of power). “What makes you think they’re going to print it?” CIA operative Higgins (Cliff Robertson) taunts Turner in front of the New York Times office, when Turner claims he has sent the paper the whole “inner CIA” story. The narrative trajectory, from naiveté to awareness, overlaps with the all-American-become-anti-establishment images of Redford and Beatty. By having the all-American star figures undergo a transformation in political awareness, the films negotiate central ideological ambiguities in the seventies.

ROBERT REDFORD AND WARREN BEATTY

59

Politics and Paranoia: Redford in All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, Warner Bros., 1976). Personal collection of James Morrison.

■

■

■

Stars are built from the aggregate of their films, and films are built from the aggregate images of their stars. For Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, this paradox means that both the structure and the practice of their star images were politically meaningful. Structurally, their images reconciled traits like conformity and rebellion, youth and maturity, or athleticism and

60

CHRIS CAGLE

intellectuality. The way they reconciled these aspects was often through a sense of vulnerability and through a self that lurked beneath the image. These contradictions had a range of ideological implications—racial, classed, and gendered—but they particularly invoked a nostalgic view of the sixties that nonetheless broke away in favor of the modernity of the seventies. These star images were not static. Individual Redford and Beatty films drew upon and recombined image traits. It seemed that in each role, the narrative exploited key contradictions in the star image to lend the character’s psychological trajectory political and thematic weight. Some pushed unstated subtexts to the point of political critique of capitalism, power, or political legitimacy. Like the aggregate star image, the star roles implied a split, a negotiation, between liberal consensus and legitimation crisis. These stars provide another lesson about the decade’s cinema. Too often, despite the rigors of academic film history, the retrospective picture of the American cinema in the seventies invokes a chasm between commercial cinema and Hollywood’s auteur cinema. Indeed there were significant differences, aesthetically and industrially. Nonetheless, the case of Redford and Beatty reveals how serious allegories and genre diversions alike shared narrative structures and ideological worldviews. The similarities speak in part to developments in the country at large and in the film industry. But the pointed use that heist films, social problem films, modernist westerns, satires, and conspiracy films made of the Redford and Beatty personae’s raw material suggests that no small credit for thematic and ideological overlap goes to the lead stars’ images. The cognitive mapping that Jameson diagnoses in the paranoid films of the period hardly ends with Redford’s and Beatty’s star images, but quite possibly it starts there. AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S I would like to thank Marc d’Agostino for his able work as research assistant for this project.

3 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Al Pacino From the Mob to the Mineshaft JOE WLODARZ

Midway through John Badham’s landmark 1970s film Saturday Night Fever (1977), after a long night burning up the dance floor at famed Brooklyn disco 2001 Odyssey, John Travolta’s Tony Manero lies sprawled out on his bed as the camera glides over his nearly naked body. Struggling to regain consciousness, Tony slowly rises from the bed to his dresser mirror and studies his appearance. Noticing his Al Pacino poster (from Serpico [1973]) reflected in the mirror, he recalls being told that he “look[ed] like Al Pacino” by a young woman at the disco. As Tony compares his own image with Pacino’s, the camera cuts to a close-up shot of the Pacino image and slowly zooms in before returning to the previous mirror framing. Embracing the comparison, Tony begins to chant “Al Pacino!” 61

62

JOE WLODARZ

repeatedly before leaping out into the hall and startling his embarrassed grandmother with his prominently displayed body. He then segues to Pacino’s trademark “Attica! Attica!” chant from Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) before the scene ends. This revealing sequence not only clarifies the star appeal of John Travolta, it also emphasizes the importance of Al Pacino as an icon of white ethnic manhood during the seventies. Tony both identifies with and extends the codes of Italianness, working-class heroism, authenticity, and social resistance that are key elements of the Pacino persona at this time. This doubling also suggests often-overlooked ties between the star image of John Travolta and that of Al Pacino, performers who typically figure the gap between television celebrity and Method actor. Indeed the camera eroticizes Travolta’s body in relation to Tony’s defiant mimicry of Pacino’s Dog Day hero, enhancing the queer resonance of both of these spectacles of Italian manhood in seventies cinema. Although posters of Bruce Lee and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa also decorate his bedroom, Tony’s close identification with the complexly gendered star image of Al Pacino seems entirely appropriate for this iconic character (and star) of the disco era. Given his close ties to a groundbreaking period in American cinema and stardom, Al Pacino certainly stands apart from Tony’s action heroes, Stallone and Lee. He’s cut from a different cloth, and he conveys a more variable and tenuous relationship to onscreen manhood. Following his debut as a leading man in Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971), a gritty exposé of heroin addiction on the streets of New York City, Pacino catapulted to screen stardom with a series of films from 1972 to 1975 that included Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974), Schatzberg’s Scarecrow (1973), as well as Lumet’s Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. Mirroring the success of fellow actors Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Elliot Gould, and Robert De Niro during this period, Pacino staked his position among this new wave of Method-trained, introspective, edgy, and ethnic male stars of the emergent Hollywood Renaissance. A key transitional period between the contract-based, persona-driven star system of classical Hollywood and the package-deal, agent-driven blockbuster era of the late seventies and eighties, the Hollywood Renaissance provided a rare window of opportunity for deglamorized character actors, often with significant stage experience, to lay claim to Hollywood stardom. As a result, tensions between art and commerce, acting and celebrity, and authenticity and inauthenticity would continually test these performers throughout the decade. Moreover, the complex roles and performances that marked this new breed of actors followed the upheavals of

AL PACINO

63

the late sixties, when the rapidly shifting cultural and political landscape helped destabilize and interrogate norms of both white masculinity and cinematic heroism. In spite of their common conflation as Hollywood Renaissance stars, each member of the aforementioned group provides a different shading to the intricate canvas of seventies cinema. Al Pacino’s films consistently present an embattled, vulnerable, and oftentimes ineffectual male protagonist who either incites or is swept up by socially destructive acts, events, or behaviors. Although his iconicity is established by his role as Michael Corleone in the Godfather films and bolstered by the compelling rebelliousness of his other major characters, Pacino’s star image is far more fraught in the seventies than is commonly remembered. Indeed, the twin poles of Michael Corleone and Pacino’s 1983 turn as Tony Montana in Brian DePalma’s cult hit Scarface tend to override the diversity of his characters during this period and their complex presentation of gender, sexuality, and the body. For example, most contemporary references to Pacino’s familiar chant of “Attica! Attica!” reduce the nuance of Dog Day Afternoon to a Tarantinoesque celebration of a presumably coherent “cool” masculinity. Countering such trends in revisionist nostalgia, it is important to explore the tensions, ruptures, and ambiguities in Pacino’s star image during this unpredictable period, particularly in how they challenge traditional white masculinity. Although ostensibly authenticated by his Italian ethnicity and his Method-based performative style, Pacino’s short, vulnerable, and frequently passive body troubles his relationship to typically masculinized visions of Italian American manhood that dominate the era. Furthermore, like no other major star then or since, Pacino works in films, particularly Dog Day Afternoon, that explicitly stage this crisis of masculinity—in varying ways—in relation to gay culture and queer sexuality. It is fascinating to see the tensions, conflicts, and erasures that emerge when a major star of the seventies adopts roles in which his masculinity and sexuality are so thoroughly problematized and rearticulated through a queer lens. After all, in what other era could we find Michael Corleone cruising the Mineshaft?1 Al Pacino’s cinematic prime significantly occurs post-Code, following the rise of gay liberation after the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, and pre-AIDS, and this window allows the gender and sexual ambiguity that plays a key role in his star image to become specifically queer. And yet, this intersection of queer sexuality with mainstream male iconicity remains highly unusual, and Pacino’s roles thus help clarify the tenuous place of masculinity, sexuality, and stardom in seventies cinema. Dog Day’s Sonny Wortzik and Scarecrow’s Francis Lionel “Lion” Delbuchi flesh out and reinflect

64

JOE WLODARZ

the patriarchal crises of Michael Corleone; they provide an alternative lens through which to view the trademark Pacino antihero. Furthermore, these queer elements in the Pacino canon aren’t anomalous; rather, they’re tied to the particular ways that his star image figures resistance, desire, the body, and identity. Indeed, it is the tensions between and among his varied roles that best capture the unique appeal of Al Pacino as an icon and image of manhood in seventies America.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

“That Droopy Thing”: A Star for the 1970s

Although ethnic masculinities have long played an important role in American cinema and culture, they have frequently been used as a counterpoint to (and thus an enabler of) white hegemony. In the seventies, the unspoken power of Richard M. Nixon’s “silent majority” revealed just how thoroughly discourses of race, ethnicity, and class defined what it meant to be an embodied subject during this period. And yet, as the Vietnam War, Watergate, feminism, and Black Power demystified and destabilized traditional white masculinity, forms of racial and ethnic difference often took on heightened significance as markers of authentic, natural, and potentially uncorrupted manhood. Such associations help explain the prominence of the ethnic, Method-trained actors of the seventies (Pacino, Hoffman, De Niro, Hackman, etc.) whose perceived status as social outsiders only enhanced their performances’ immersive approach to physical and psychological realism. These men functioned as everyday heroes (and antiheroes) during a period in which the traditional norms of white male heroism and power were increasingly interrogated, countered, and simply rejected. Throughout the decade, Al Pacino’s performances and star persona were most commonly discussed in relation to those of Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. On many occasions, critics even remarked on the difficulty of distinguishing among Pacino, De Niro, and Hoffman. But cultural conceptions (and stereotypes) of the relationship between gender and ethnicity trouble simple conflations among the three men. Put simply, in the seventies, cultural associations of Italian Americans with natural masculinity frequently work in opposition to the more neurotic, insecure manhood presented by Jewish stars like Hoffman, Elliot Gould, and, especially, Woody Allen. And yet, if it is Hoffman’s ties to the Method that allow him to break free from the exaggerated presentation of “Jewishness” so closely aligned with Allen, his major roles in the sixties and seventies remain marked by a certain insecurity, fallibility, and vulnerability.

AL PACINO

65

In a Village Voice article on Elliot Gould, film critic J. Hoberman argues that the “Jew Wave” of the early seventies—in which Jewish stars became popular leading men and served as figures of the precarious state of white masculinity—was soon displaced by the vogue for Italian Americans as more conventional icons of male rebellion and strength (“Goulden Age,” 18–24 April 2007, 38). Indeed, De Niro’s ethnicity, enhanced by the Italian American contexts so central to his work with Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, is key to his distinct brand of fiery, explosive masculinity in films like The Godfather, Part II and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Raging Bull (1980). Ties to the urban working class further consolidate the perceived and presumed masculinity of the De Niro figure in seventies cinema, even in films such as Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) that veer from explicitly Italian American contexts. Although Pacino and his characters share many of these characteristics with De Niro, particularly a tendency toward explosiveness, he’s less consistently masculinized by his Italian American and working-class affiliations. His characters are more physically and emotionally vulnerable when De Niro’s are hard. There’s a lingering sensitivity and softness to Pacino’s characters that pales in comparison to the many De Niro roles (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver) in which violence trumps victimhood. Even when the stars are specifically compared and contrasted in The Godfather, Part II, the vitality and ambition of De Niro’s Vito Corleone only enhance the tragedy of Michael’s entrapment and his enervating cynicism and corruption. Pacino’s early stage performances as sadistic New York street punks in The Indian Wants the Bronx (1968) and Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (1969) garnered him both an Obie and a Tony award, respectively, and initially established his reputation as dangerously volatile and aggressive. Beginning with The Panic in Needle Park, Pacino’s film performances in the seventies build on his stage persona and deliver explosive and unpredictable emotional outbursts and aggressive fits of rage. Author William Schoell refers to such trademark moments as “Pacino blasts,” and several critics over the years have commented on the power of this coiled, simmering intensity in his performances (18). And yet, the affective power of such “blasts” is just as frequently tempered and complicated by the many moments of vulnerability, sensitivity, pensiveness, passivity, and, at times, boyish naïveté that also define Pacino’s film characters and persona. In his Esquire review of Serpico, John Simon suggests that “Pacino has the happy gift of suggesting a mind ceaselessly mobile under a fixed facade, some beast within perpetually coiled for action but as likely to spring into the form of a gamboling lapdog as into that of a lethal panther” (“Films,” March 1974, 70). Moreover, while

66

JOE WLODARZ

his Italianness provides him with a certain erotic intensity à la De Niro, his film roles also typically suggest the fragility and neuroses of Hoffman. What’s key to the power of Pacino’s performances is the marked tension between explosiveness and vulnerability, activity and passivity, even masculinity and femininity. He crosses these lines in far more unpredictable (and ambiguous) ways than either De Niro or Hoffman, and these constant transformations enable the uniquely queer resonance of his presentation of white masculinity in seventies film. Pacino’s screen characters are all, to varying degrees, outcasts: alienated, vulnerable, passive, assaulted, and alone. As the New York Times noted in a rare 1977 interview, “Pacino’s characters—even supposed winners like Bobby Deerfield—are misfits, people out of the mainstream, besieged by and battling society’s expectations of conformity” (Mel Gussow, “The Basic Training of Al Pacino,” 5 June 1977, 22). The narrative trajectory and visual presentation of Michael Corleone in The Godfather films helpfully encapsulates many of these aspects and tensions in the overall Pacino persona. Michael, of course, begins at the margins of the mob, the family, and the visual frame at the beginning of The Godfather. In his marine uniform with traces of his boyish rebelliousness still apparent, he explains away the Corleone violence by insisting: “That’s my family, Kay, that’s not me.” The film’s (admittedly ambivalent) interrogation of traditional masculinity is hinted at early on when Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone mocks the weeping actor/crooner Johnny Fontana (Al Martino)—calling him a “Hollywood finocchio” (or “fag”)—and questions him about his relationship to family. He then explains: “The man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” Michael’s tragic downfall, marked by his killing of Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) in the Italian restaurant, is a direct consequence of his embrace of patriarchal family ties and his insistence on revenge. It is simply “personal” for Michael at this point, and the buildup to this climactic moment emphasizes Michael’s (and Pacino’s) smallness, his vulnerability, his bruised face, his uncertainty. The power of the sequence—a literal “blast” from Pacino—depends strictly on our awareness of Michael’s fear and doubt. He squeezes his hands to his head in the bathroom, attempting to block out the tense sounds of a screeching train, and his wide, expressive eyes dart nervously just before the gunshots. Pacino’s understatement is crucial here, but he provides just enough evidence of his ethical and emotional conflict that the gravity (and cost) of the act is readily apparent. The hardening of Michael that occurs here is a trope that remains important to most of Pacino’s roles and is closely tied to the

AL PACINO

67

cultural ambivalence and uncertainty about patriarchal manhood that defines the decade. The cold, calculating monster Michael becomes in The Godfather, Part II extends Coppola’s critique of American patriarchy and its ties to capitalism, and is anchored by what Pauline Kael called Pacino’s remarkably “immobile performance” (Reeling 532). Michael here is quiet, reserved, inaccessible; he’s frozen by his iconic status. He erupts only when betrayed—first by his brother Fredo, then by his wife Kay—when his power and prestige are threatened. As Pacino himself explains, “There’s such a dichotomy in Michael, he’s so ambivalent. It’s this dichotomy that finally leads to his madness. He is lost at the end of the film. He’s a beaten man” (in Yule 95). In the tragic flashback coda of The Godfather, Part II, in which Coppola provides one final glimpse of Michael’s youthful, rebellious, and conscientious past during a dinner scene, Sonny (James Caan) introduces him to a guest as “that droopy thing.” Although it initially comes off as just another of Sonny’s harmless wisecracks, this characterization is in many ways a perfect assessment of both Michael and Al Pacino. The film closes on an image of the battered, aged Michael reclining outdoors in a chair, weighed down by the enormity of his actions, as Gordon Willis’s camera emphasizes the sagging flesh under his once hopeful eyes. An iconic image of patriarchal collapse, this vision of Michael figures the ossification of the Pacino vitality and yet also acknowledges the prominence of physical vulnerability, passivity, insecurity, and even “droopy” bodily carriage throughout Pacino’s films. Although celebrated for its movement and energy during his memorable moments of acting out, Pacino’s body is just as frequently shown in states of pain, weakness, and exhaustion. Serpico opens on Pacino’s bloodied face after Frank Serpico has been shot in the cheek. A police car transports him to a hospital where his near lifeless body is undressed and closely examined. By the end of the film, when we return to the bed-ridden victim, Serpico breaks down and cries as the camera concentrates on his wounded face. Similarly, in Scarecrow, Pacino’s Lion is brutally beaten and raped by a fellow inmate and ends the film on his back in a catatonic state. We often find Pacino’s characters lying down, reclining, and resting, as if the weight of the world were bearing down upon them. From film to film, he repeatedly uses the gesture of putting his face in his hands to convey a sense of agony, exhaustion, and despair that his character cannot verbalize. He’s remarkably passive for a male star, and suffering, regret, and disillusionment almost always surround his “blasts” of aggression and resistance. Size matters here, of course: Pacino has a distinct height disadvantage in relation to most other major male stars of the era. In presenting the

68

JOE WLODARZ

American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award to Pacino in 2007, Robin Williams acknowledged this discrepancy and joked: “If you put Robert De Niro in a dryer, you get Al Pacino!” Pacino’s shortness never fails to signify in one way or another. It both peppers his spontaneous action and exaggerates his physical vulnerability. The camera rarely makes accommodations for his height, and, as a result, he is often positioned lower in the frame than other actors. The effects of this positioning are unpredictable—Michael Corleone, in fact, seems most threatening when seated—but like Hoffman, Pacino’s onscreen presence involves a constant negotiation of his size. Although his short stature gives him a bouncing, frenetic energy, this charismatic energy is rarely coded as erotic. Indeed, part of the ambiguity of Al Pacino’s star image is tied to the difficulty involved in categorizing him in relation to expressions of sexual desire. While a certain erotic quality pervades a number of his films, Pacino is rarely presented as an explicitly sexual figure. As Kathleen Murphy notes, “When it comes to onscreen lovemaking, Pacino mostly eschews naked eroticism, preferring a sexual reticence remarkable among mainstream American film stars” (“Al Pacino: Dancing on the High Wire,” Film Comment, March/April 2000, 28). Michael’s controlled restraint in The Godfather contrasts with the wild sexual energy of Sonny, for example. In addition, Pacino’s characters rarely carry their body in a sexually assured manner. They’re at times playfully flirtatious, especially Frank Serpico, Panic’s Bobby, and Scarecrow’s Lion, but such behavior is rarely motivated by sexual desire. At the same time, the camera seldom attempts to eroticize Pacino’s body in the manner of Travolta in Saturday Night Fever or even De Niro in Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese’s camera in Taxi revels in Travis Bickle’s newly toned body and infuses a raw, sexual energy into the insecure, socially awkward character. In contrast, the general sexual ambivalence of Pacino’s characters gets intriguingly reinforced and reinflected in Cruising, and even his excessively phallic bodily carriage as Tony Montana in Scarface—Pacino’s version of an eighties “hard body”— only emphasizes the performative aspects of Tony’s destructive hypermasculinity (see Jeffords). Furthermore, when Pacino’s body is more explicitly shown in his seventies films, it’s almost always while he’s showering or bathing. A quick shower scene in The Panic in Needle Park provides one of the rare full shots of Pacino’s naked body (from behind) in any of his films. We do see him without his shirt from time to time, but again, rarely in an erotic context (often in bathtubs), and the camera seldom lingers on his physique. In addition, sex scenes in Pacino’s films are almost entirely elided. We sometimes see Pacino in post-coital moments of playfulness (Panic, . . . And Justice for

AL PACINO

69

All [1979]), in which he laughs and jokes with his partner, but with the exception of Cruising, sex scenes are deemphasized in Pacino’s films. And interestingly, when they are shown, Pacino is frequently acted upon by his female (or male) partners. Pacino’s Bobby lies on his back with Lillian (Marthe Keller, Pacino’s real-life love interest at the time) on top in the sex scene from Sidney Pollack’s Bobby Deerfield (1977) as she caresses, rubs, and kisses his body. Frank Serpico is thoroughly washed by a girlfriend in a tub scene, and he later receives a deep massage as he lies shirtless on his stomach. And in Cruising, Steve Burns is caught by fellow officers fully naked, bound, and face down on a bed while trying to entrap the (wrongly identified) killer. A sense of passivity defines Pacino as an erotic figure, and his ambiguous positioning as a sex symbol further complicates the presentation of the white male body during this period. This element is perhaps most apparent in the marketing and promotional imagery used to sell Pacino as a star (and, arguably, as a sex symbol) in seventies America. The promotional material (lobby cards, stills, etc.) for Pacino’s films concentrates on two primary elements: his pensive, mournful face and his vulnerable body. In stills from Scarecrow, Dog Day Afternoon, and Bobby Deerfield, Pacino is again shown lying down in bed or on the ground. His body is seldom photographed without clothes, and when it is— as in the marketing for Bobby Deerfield in particular—he appears far from seductive or comfortable with this display. Stills from Dog Day Afternoon play up his anguish and conflict. In a few examples, his face and body are bisected by obstructions in the frame; in another, he lies on the ground outside the bank, face in hands, in a near fetal position. The promotional images from Scarecrow are even more revealing. One still captures Pacino’s physical vulnerability just before his character Lion is raped. Others focus on his bruised, bloodied face as his buddy Max (Gene Hackman) attempts to comfort him after the attack. Far more than his sex appeal, such images play up the emotional and physical pain that defines his star persona. While Pacino’s often passive, battered body troubles any simple association of him with typical masculine eroticism, his face is typically referenced as key to his dramatic and romantic appeal. Interviewer Maureen Dowd, for example, writing in GQ, points to the power of Pacino’s “mournful, basset-hound eyes” and cites director Garry Marshall, who claims that Pacino has “the best eyes in the world” (“Al Alone,” September 1992, 280). Here again, we find indirect references to the “droopy” qualities (“bassethound eyes”) that define Pacino and defy the typical associations of masculine faces with hard edges, square jaws, and piercing eyes. James Naremore has also suggested that De Niro and Hoffman are “far less romantic than

70

JOE WLODARZ

Marketing Al Pacino’s vulnerable body: Pacino with Gene Hackman in Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, Warner Bros., 1973). Personal collection of Joe Wlodarz.

Pacino, who has a pretty face and a collection of narcissistic gestures borrowed from Brando” (270n4). As with most Hollywood stars, Pacino’s face is a prominent feature in his promotional marketing, but these images often foreground his downcast eyes and doleful expression. He looks away from the camera, he rarely smiles, and his head is often leaning against a wall or hanging downward. There’s an unquestionable romantic appeal in such images, but Pacino’s distinctiveness is tied to the various ways that such images deny, reject, and assail conventional modes of representing white masculinity. Pacino’s star image serves him very well in his groundbreaking roles in Dog Day Afternoon and Cruising, as both films are attentive to the burden of normative sexuality and traditional gender roles. Pacino thrives in Dog Day; the film’s emotional power stems directly from his unique balance of vulnerability and volatility, and the passion of his performance is a standout in cinema of the decade. Cruising, in contrast, initially seems like a misfire. Panned by critics and disavowed by Pacino himself, the film tests the limits of both his star image and American manhood at the end of the decade. That said, Cruising’s opacity, its disjointedness, and its perplexing vision of masculinity and sexuality are closely tied to Pacino’s own ambiguity as an

AL PACINO

71

erotic figure in film. Indeed, the shock of Pacino immersing himself in a sexually explicit role (straight or gay) never diminishes throughout Cruising, and this unsettling combination of male iconicity and identity-confounding eroticism continues to challenge conceptions and recollections of stardom, sexuality, and manhood dominant at the time.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Boys in the Bank

The fall of the Production Code, the emergence of gay liberation, and the success of gay-themed films such as William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970) and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) opened the door for an expansion of queer elements in mainstream cinema that really culminates with Pacino’s performance as Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon. Moreover, the alignment of Pacino and his characters with the socially marginal as well as with non-normative forms of gendered behavior fostered a variety of both connotative and denotative forms of queer expression in his films. For example, in Serpico, police authorities harass Pacino’s enigmatic cop Frank Serpico with homophobic taunts, in part because of his alignment with countercultural values. In one memorable scene, Serpico proclaims his interest in ballet to a male coworker in a jokingly flirtatious manner and then demonstrates a few “positions” for him. In a later and more direct attack, Serpico’s superior accuses him of “going down” on a fellow officer after he spots him in the men’s bathroom with the lights off. Amid the rigidly traditional (and anxious) police force, Serpico’s (and Pacino’s) eccentricity is easily conflated with homosexuality. Pacino’s role in Scarecrow closely relates to his appearances in Dog Day and Cruising as it presents the most clearly romanticized and affectionate male relationship among the buddy films that dominate early seventies Hollywood. Scarecrow opens with a courtship of sorts as Pacino’s Francis flirtatiously charms Gene Hackman’s Max into joining him on the open road. Throughout most of the film, Pacino is adorably playful and naïve. He appears youthfully soft, and his affection for Max, who renames him “Lion,” is quite clear. In addition to his many longing looks at Max, Lion is also very physical with him. He puts his arm around Max as they walk down the street, he attempts to dance hand-in-hand with him in a crowded bar, he introduces Max as his “wife” in a later bar scene, and when they are sent to a detention center, he implores an angry Max to “pretend we’re on a cruise together.” And yet, given the expansion of gay visibility and the near explicitness of Lion’s attentions—the film even inspired “queer readings” in the Times—Scarecrow also introduces its own

72

JOE WLODARZ

forms of disavowal (Stephen Farber, “Just a Locker Room Fantasy?” New York Times, 13 May 1973, 2:13; Aljean Harmetz, “When Boy Meets Boy,” New York Times, 20 January 1974, 2:1). The most notable example takes place after the men are imprisoned and a fellow inmate first befriends, then rapes, Lion. The rape significantly occurs while Max is angry with Lion and refuses to speak to him. Thus the dissolution of the idealized buddy couple opens the door for more dangerously perverse forms of desire between men. Lion explains to Max that he fought the rapist off, but his bloodied and battered face—on full view in the film’s promotional stills—tells a different story, and this brutal assault contributes to Lion’s eventual catatonia. Here, as in The Godfather and Serpico, the rebellious, playful, and sensitive spirit of Pacino’s Lion ultimately succumbs to a form of patriarchal brutality. Ultimately, though, Scarecrow’s persistent disavowals reveal an inability to reconceive the parameters of traditional masculinity, sexuality, and affective relations between men. In contrast to the hesitation of Scarecrow, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon fully embraces the dramatic and critical potential of screening homosexuality through the star image of Al Pacino. Adapted from the true story of a failed 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery that quickly became a neighborhood event and media spectacle, Dog Day Afternoon was one of the major commercial and artistic triumphs of the decade. Centered on a married, bisexual protagonist who commits the robbery in order to pay for his lover’s sex-change operation, the role was also an extremely daring one for an actor of Al Pacino’s youth and prominence. And yet, countering typically “distancing” traditions of queer character performance, Pacino brings remarkable depth, passion, and energy to his performance, and Sonny has become one of the defining roles of his long career. The fusion of actor and role in Dog Day, in fact, extends far beyond the Method: in the Life magazine article that inspired the screenplay, the bank robber John Wojtowicz was described as “a dark, thin fellow with the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino or a Dustin Hoffman” (P. F. Kluge and Thomas Moore, “The Boys in the Bank,” Life, 22 September 1972, 66). Unlike the more confrontational Cruising, Dog Day Afternoon was embraced by the public and, for the most part, the critical establishment. The reason for this acceptance stems not only from Pacino’s electric performance and the film’s nuanced portrait of a media spectacle; it also builds from Dog Day’s interrogation of the place of the law, the media, and society in policing and containing social and sexual deviance. Pacino’s star presence is crucial here, as our alignment with him works continually to expose such forces of surveillance, entrapment, and control rather than perpetuate them.

AL PACINO

73

Indeed, what’s fascinating about both Dog Day Afternoon and Cruising, particularly because of Pacino’s presence, is their thorough critique of and assault on processes of identification and voyeurism that usually serve to empower the heterosexual male viewer at the expense of women and queers. For not only do these films complicate the conventions of viewer identification with onscreen male heroes, they ultimately refuse to codify and contain gender and sexual alterity. They frequently test divisions between self and other, heterosexual and homosexual, masculine and feminine, male and female. Their affective and critical power finally stems from the various ways they traffic in the threat and promise of this very instability and dissolution. Dog Day Afternoon quickly brings us to the scene of the crime as Pacino and his two partners (one of whom will quickly bail out) enter the bank and prep for the robbery. Throughout much of its duration, the film maintains a tension between a distanced, surveillance-based observation of Sonny and a clear intimacy with the character (and star) based in close-ups. While our alignment with Sonny intensifies as the film progresses, this growing intimacy is constantly interrupted by external views of the bank. These often-extreme long shots—points-of-view from the armed police forces outside—clarify the film’s prevailing theme of entrapment. Of course, Sonny is also trapped by the conflicting affections of the media, his lover, his wife, and his mother. The film continually thematizes and visualizes the binaries inside/ outside and private/public, particularly in relation to identity and celebrity. Its narrative and visual design is based on a play between interiors and exteriors, between the bank and the street. In fact, the number of times in which agents and policemen implore Sonny to literally “come out” of the bank clarifies their own investment in Sonny’s social and sexual visibility. Ultimately, though, the film seems to be much more about the blurring of lines between interiority and exteriority and about the social control that is always implicated in any acknowledgment or affirmation of identity. Sonny, after all, has no interest in claiming any identity in the film, and he does his best to deemphasize the imposition of a homosexual identity by the law and the media. In attempting to temper his cohort Sal’s (John Cazale) anxiety about being labeled queer, Sonny insists, “It doesn’t matter . . . it’s just a freak show to them anyway.” But, of course, it clearly does matter, particularly to the media, the law, the crowd, and the film’s own audience. Yet Pacino erases Sonny’s potential “freakishness” as quickly as the film’s forces of authority try to impose it. His avoidance of any stereotypically mannered behavior naturalizes his performance and

74

JOE WLODARZ

normalizes Sonny. He shows the audience that, indeed, it really might not matter. Sonny’s lover Leon (Chris Sarandon) plays a crucial narrative and ideological role in the film, and his much-delayed introduction provides its biggest surprise. Dog Day toys with its viewers’ heterosexual presumption by cutting from Sonny’s request to see his “wife” to images of his legal wife Angie (Susan Peretz) and his kids. Later, when Detective Moretti (Charles Durning) tells Sonny that his “wife is here,” we’re shown shots of Leon getting out of the car. As the facts become clear to both the viewer and the film’s diegetic audience, one of the cops outside states: “He’s a queer.” The immediate effect of this abrupt narrative shift is to expose the audience’s (and society’s) investment in heteronormativity. The potential for a homophobic response in the audience is then directly represented in the police interrogation of Leon, in which he is surrounded by fascinated cops, some of whom giggle and mock him as he reveals his condition as a “woman trapped in a man’s body.” Leon’s entrance also initiates other important shifts in the film. The FBI’s surveillance increases as the lights in the bank are turned off and spotlights are placed outside. The film’s tone subsequently shifts from fumbling comedy to a more somber and foreboding drama, and the camerawork and framing become oppressively claustrophobic. This dramatic turn inhibits a farcical or absurdist approach to the queer revelations, and it gives Pacino a forum to express the softer, sensitive, and vulnerable side of Sonny. In the film’s most poignant scene, largely improvised by the actors, Sonny and Leon finally speak on the telephone. Intense scrutiny and surveillance rise to new levels here as queer contact actually occurs (even though the phone blocks physical contact). As intimate close-ups intensify the emotional charge of this farewell scene between Leon and Sonny, threatening closeups of Moretti and the FBI men monitoring the conversation are intercut. But as in many scenes in the film, identification with the characters—a function of Pacino’s star status and the camera’s intimacy—overrides an investigative gaze, and the typical surveillance of the queer body is both hindered and critiqued. As the film progresses, our identification with Sonny and his plight becomes more, not less, pronounced, which is remarkable given the film’s revelations, but unsurprising, given its star. The bank tellers themselves best exemplify this increased identification in the film. After the stunned silence that accompanies the TV revelation of Sonny’s sexuality, we later see the tellers sitting in a circle around Sonny and asking him questions about his plans in a very supportive manner. Talking about his “travel” options, one

AL PACINO

75

Pacino’s forlorn face in a still from The Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, Twentieth Century–Fox, 1971). Personal collection of Joe Wlodarz.

76

JOE WLODARZ

teller advises, “You know, Holland’s pretty good.” The tellers’ increased sympathy for Sonny is matched by a more forceful attempt by the FBI to capture him, however. The interior lights are actually shut off during the “Holland” conversation, and Agent Sheldon’s (James Broderick) entrance into the bank immediately follows. The film makes it clear that privacy and interiority are notoriously difficult to sustain in the Watergate era. But if privacy in the film is particularly vulnerable to the prying eyes of the law and the media, the flip side of privacy, celebrity, remains an equally precarious position to occupy in the seventies. Television is clearly the medium that links and expands the spectacle of the crime to a broader public. As such, it is also the medium that makes instant celebrities. Sonny pauses in surprise when he sees himself on the television. The head teller boasts that she “was on television,” following one venture outside the bank. After handing over his pizzas to Sonny, the delivery boy thrusts his arms in the air and proclaims “I’m a fuckin’ star!” And Sonny himself is both empowered and assailed by his newfound status as a celebrity. He uses this star power quite effectively in the infamous “Attica!” scene to ignite the crowd and threaten the police, but it is also this excessive visibility that makes him an object of scrutiny and investigation. The crowds grow in response to the television coverage of Sonny, and significantly, different segments of the community begin to turn out in support of him. While the Brooklyn masses gathered on the street heroize Sonny and his rebellious, working-class spirit early on, after the Leon revelation a significant portion of them openly mock him. Dog Day thus acknowledges the potential consequences of Pacino taking on an openly gay role by showing some of his onscreen “fans” turning on him. Indeed, while Pacino’s naturalized performance works to counter a potential distancing from Sonny, there remains a related twofold threat. For one, Pacino’s performative ease could suggest his own queerness to confounded viewers. But the reverse scenario—and the more radical possibility for this era—is that some queers might actually be indistinguishable, in their masculinity, from Al Pacino. Audience identification with Sonny (and Pacino) thus tests the limits of Hollywood cinema’s typical reliance upon and maintenance of clear boundaries of gender, sexuality, and identity. Dog Day Afternoon extends the investment of the Hollywood Renaissance in the socially marginal, the oppressed, the “other,” to the realm of the sexual. It encourages identification with difference, with otherness, in its mainstream viewers, in order to foreground the dangerously coercive force of the law and the media in relation to social norms. Indeed, the desire to identify (and thus contain) Sonny remains in

AL PACINO

77

both the film’s authorities and its viewers, and Dog Day Afternoon’s ultimate refusal to do so is the key to its dramatic and ideological power. Some critics of the era, though, were not quite ready to listen to Sonny’s story: in one of the most indirectly revealing critical assessments of the film, and one of its few critical pans, Time’s Richard Schickel praised Pacino’s performance, but added: “One tries to be sympathetic, in the nothing-humanis-alien-to-me manner. But the viewer leaves the theater with that most devastating of disclaimers: this has nothing to do with me” (“Lost Connection,” 6 October 1975, 70). Few critical comments get right to the core of straight male anxieties occasioned by Pacino’s queer screen presence the way this simple statement of disavowal does. But Pacino’s next foray into gay territory would offer even less opportunity for viewer distanciation and provoke even greater anxiety. For William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising is specifically about the fears and desires associated with queer immersion.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

“How’d You Like to Disappear?”

Cruising was preproduced, shot, edited, and postproduced at the very end of the seventies, making newspaper headlines nationwide when gay rights groups protested the film’s production. In the movie, Pacino’s Steve Burns is a rookie cop sent undercover to track a murderer lurking and hunting within the gay leather scene in New York City. Slowly, but surely, he sinks ever deeper into this queer underworld; he begins to mirror the film’s primary killer, and by the end of the film, he has himself become a suspect in the latest gay murder. Both before and after the film’s release, critics and protestors decried the film’s use of a contagion theory of homosexuality, exposed its tendency to conflate gay sex with violence, and insisted on the film’s potential to incite homophobic violence in its viewers. But while the film quickly faded away after its release, it nevertheless retained an important position in the history of the celluloid closet, and it has more recently been reappraised and even celebrated for its daring and its documentary-like exploration of the pre-AIDS gay sex scene in New York City. Pacino himself has long disowned the film—never for any clear reason other than its controversial production and his bad perm—and so it is that Cruising is seldom discussed in career retrospectives or recent interviews with the actor. In a rare invocation of the film in a 1984 interview in Rolling Stone, Pacino was asked what his response was when he finally saw it; only half-jokingly, he declared: “Where do I go now? What do I do?” (Larry Grobel, “Al Pacino Has Something to Say,” 2 February 1984, 18). This career

78

JOE WLODARZ

disorientation was enhanced by a series of critical and commercial failures following Dog Day, and it also mirrors the response of many critics and audiences to the film. Cruising is, in fact, specifically about a loss of identity and a loosening of one’s grip on a secure sense of sexuality and of self. In an early scene, the naive rookie Burns—who chuckles with embarrassment when asked about his experiences with gay sex—receives his undercover assignment. Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) asks him: “How’d you like to disappear?” Although this is a literal reference to the covert nature of the operation, the question gains thematic resonance when Edelson clarifies that Burns is being chosen specifically because he resembles the victims in the recent gay male homicides. Edelson’s question is repeated (presumably as part of Burns’s memory) during one of the film’s key transformation scenes in which the detective applies dark eyeliner to his face and begins to adopt the persona of the macho gay leatherman, an echo that reemphasizes and reinflects Cruising’s concentration on appearing and disappearing, and visibility and invisibility just as it also anticipates the film’s later conflation of policing with cruising for gay sex. Moreover, Burns’s “disappearance” into the gay underworld also suggests a death of sorts, since his resemblance to the gay victims is what gets him the case. He is seriously affected by the new assignment, and the gradual dissolution of his normative male identity (and the parallel troubling of Pacino’s) in relation to his encounter with S/M and hypermasculine gay sex culture is key to the film’s transgressive power. As advertisements declared over a huge, shadowed image of Pacino’s face locked in a direct stare: “Al Pacino is cruising for a killer!” Part of the emerging high concept era, the film was prominently sold as an Al Pacino vehicle, and identification with his character is presumed. Pacino’s narrative immersion in the S/M underworld parallels the viewer’s; for the first time in Hollywood history, we become part of an underground gay sex scene and are implicated in the circuits of desire that charge it. While Dog Day Afternoon emphasizes the condition of being watched, Cruising instead concentrates on the disruptive potential of looking and seeing, indeed rejects any safe distance implied by the viewer’s desire “just to watch” by preventing the attainment of voyeuristic knowledge: it repeatedly blurs boundaries between Burns and his subjects, between watcher and watched, between cruiser and cruised. There is no frame of reference to determine whether Burns (or Pacino) derives pleasure from this environment or whether he is merely doing his job. In the hypersexualized spaces of the bars and parks, thrilling “danger” is tied to the persistent promise (and threat) of returned looks, erotic reversals, and physical contact. Countering

AL PACINO

79

Pacino’s often troubled relationship to direct expressions of sexuality, these vibrantly shot, highly aestheticized contexts (and costumes) also insist on the eroticization of his character. While Pacino’s performance in Dog Day ultimately fosters identification, the ambiguity of his performance in Cruising repeatedly unsettles the viewer. We’re never quite sure where Burns and Pacino are taking us. As he transforms from a novice in a standard brown police uniform to a clone in a white tank top and jeans and, finally, to a full-on hypermasculine leatherman, Burns is shown in multiple situations that seem to be leading to sexual encounters. Most enticing of these, perhaps, is a sequence that depicts the film’s initial killer cruising him under a Central Park bridge. As he walks off with the man, the screen ambiguously fades to black.2 Within the film’s logic, Burns (and Pacino) can be thoroughly absorbed into this environment by donning the appropriate look. The slippages between performance and identity soon become overwhelming for Burns, and elements from the gay underground begin to creep into his sexual relations with his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen). In a memorable scene, prominently featured in the promotional materials, Burns, in a black tank top, stands next to a nearly identical man at a bar before taking in the spectacle of a man being fisted in a swing. A fellow cruiser then pulls him to the dance floor, where Burns gets into the music after sniffing ether from a soaked hankie. Pacino’s dancing—always a jarring moment in his films—is jerky, non-rhythmic, and based on several aggressive arm thrusts. Close-ups of Burns’s ever-increasing pleasure and his sweat-soaked body are then intercut with shots of three nearly naked men groping each other, another suspect cruising him, a quick insert of the fisting scenario, and an electric American flag. This circuit of desire, heightened by Bud Smith’s frenzied editing, envelops Burns (and the viewer) and suggests the testing and expansion of sexual limits and boundaries: this is a “Pacino blast” with unique connotations and consequences. It expands the erotic aspects of Pacino’s onscreen outbursts, and yet it also frames such energy as excessive, decadent, even potentially dangerous. The “blast” here threatens to overwhelm both Burns and Pacino, introducing the radical possibility of their pleasure in such sexual activities and contexts, but it’s ultimately a potential that director William Friedkin either cannot see or willfully shuts down. Pacino’s performance was criticized as “opaque,” “numbed,” “passive,” and “distant.” Most critics complained about the ambiguity of the film’s narrative and, particularly, Burns’s character. In the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel simply wanted to know: “Why do these men do the things they do?”

80

JOE WLODARZ

As its antenna bisects him in the frame, the TV makes Sonny (Pacino) both celebrity and outcast in Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, Warner Bros., 1975). Personal collection of Joe Wlodarz.

(“Pacino, Friedkin, ‘Cruising’ to a Dead End,” 15 February 1980, C1). Vincent Canby complained about the film in the New York Times, “It makes no attempt to comprehend . . . it just stares” (“Another Country,” 15 February 1980, C6). Canby’s frustration—and the pronounced homophobia that marked the mainstream critical response to the film—is tied to the film’s troubling of this hegemonic search for knowledge about homosexuality. Cruising insistently frustrates an ethnographic gaze in its depiction of the gay underworld. In this way, it can be viewed as the culmination of Al Pacino’s complex challenge to both star/audience conventions and the parameters of gender and sexual identity in seventies cinema. Pacino’s career in fact takes a significant downturn after the huge success of Dog Day Afternoon, and the controversies and conflicts surrounding Cruising only exacerbate his professional troubles. Pacino went on a lengthy run of films that failed both commercially and critically. Rarely has the star treatment so damaged the career of a Hollywood superstar. Perhaps too much a creature of the late sixties/early seventies, Pacino could not adapt to the high-concept requirements of male stardom that marked the transition to the eighties. Surely the age of Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980)

AL PACINO

81

and the “hard bodies” of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger demanded new modes and styles of white male stardom, and Pacino’s failure in both “sensitive” and “macho” roles attests to his difficulty adapting to a new era of film culture and industry. His unique brand of vulnerability remained tied to a Vietnam, Watergate, recession-era malaise that simply didn’t jibe well with mainstream representations of either the “new man” or the “hard body.” If the excesses and macho hysteria of Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface would eventually be recuperated by hip-hop culture and gain legendary cult status in the nineties, that very reclamation further buried the queer resonance and the gendered ambiguity of Pacino’s seventies stardom. For in spite of contemporary revisionism, Al Pacino’s star image in this decade was remarkably conflicted, fraught, and ambiguous. His appeal as an actor and star was tied to the various ways that he made vulnerability and sensitivity compulsively watchable and compulsively captivating. N OT E S 1. The Mineshaft was a notoriously raunchy (and popular) gay leather bar/sex club in late seventies New York City that served as the primary model for Cruising’s bar scenes. 2. In the 2007 DVD version of the film, the fade to black has been removed and replaced with a direct cut to Burns on the street the next morning. The audio dissolve (and fade) remain, though.

4 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields “New Ways to Look at the Young” CYNTHIA ERB

In 1979, Time featured thirteen-year-old Diane Lane on its cover, with an accompanying story touting a new wave of “Hollywood whiz kids”—young female performers “making their presence felt in films” (John Skow, “Hollywood Whiz Kids,” 13 August 1979, 64). The trend had begun early in the decade with Linda Blair’s appearance in The Exorcist (1973) and Tatum O’Neal’s Oscar-winning performance in Paper Moon (1973). Despite the advent of the Spielberg boy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 (see Pomerance), film critic John Skow characterized the trend as consisting entirely of young female stars, including Lane (A Little Romance, 1979), 82

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

83

Mariel Hemingway (Manhattan, 1979), Linda Manz (Days of Heaven, 1978), and Kristy McNichol (television series “Family” [1976–80]). Skow celebrated this trend of “surprising children and their adventurous directors . . . [for] showing the camera new ways to look at the young” (64). As the trend coincided with the surge of second-wave feminism, however, more than one feminist critic characterized it as a backlash. In a typically witty essay dedicated to the media prominence of Jodie Foster and O’Neal, Molly Haskell wrote, “Female kiddies, moppets, and nymphets—of course!— an ingenious solution by moviemakers to complaints about the shortage of women in films” (“Jodie Foster and Tatum O’Neal,” Ms., April 1977, 49). Certainly this feminist critique of Hollywood’s turn to children had merit. From a current standpoint, however, the prominence of the child in mid- to late 1970s media culture raises the question of how these images became signs of social change, within feminism and elsewhere. In his psychological study Children of Crisis, Robert Coles argued that the most transformative images of the postwar era had been the 1950s photographs of African American children entering schools under fire during desegregation (xvii). In the 1970s, a series of court rulings found that the desegregation of schools was not taking place fast enough, and this led to the highly contested practice of busing students across district lines in Boston and other urban areas (Williams, “Education” 154–55, 159–61). Education also became an early site for introducing feminist ideals when Title IX, a law prohibiting sex discrimination in the schools, was passed in 1972, and implemented in 1975 (C. L. Hogan, “Revolutionizing School and Sports,” Ms., May 1982, 25–27). And the children’s rights movement surged during the decade, inspiring an influential legal paper by Hillary Rodham, as well as a youth liberation movement founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Margolin 44–52). In the late seventies it seemed as if, following upon the counterculture’s emphasis on youth and generational change, Hollywood was beginning to recruit even younger children to make its dramatic and political points. Two performances that received a great deal of critical attention were Jodie Foster’s appearance in Taxi Driver (1976) and Brooke Shields’s performance in Pretty Baby (1978). Foster’s and Shields’s roles as child prostitutes were often described as Lolita-type performances transforming the possibilities for using children in film. In this chapter, I focus on the young Foster and Shields, referring to a Foucauldian method for examining the sexing of the child in popular culture. Part of the surprise of Michel Foucault’s oft-cited The History of Sexuality is his frequent turn to the child as example (1990). Foucault famously challenged Freud’s sexing of the child as the repressed secret at the heart of

84

CYNTHIA ERB

bourgeois family life. His challenge took three parts: that modernity is characterized by a proliferation of sexual discourses; that the proliferating discourses of sex are implanted in systems defined by the play of pleasure and power; and that this play of discourses exposes the institutions that have a stake in monitoring sex and power. Originally published in the mid1970s, The History of Sexuality reflected its moment, as a variety of identitybased movements—feminism, gay rights, disability rights, rights of the aged, children’s rights—insisted upon the public articulation of new sexual possibilities. Hollywood’s vogue for female children created a context for dramatizing relations between sex and power that are still taboo within mainstream filmmaking.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Foster as Tomboy: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Freaky Friday

Critics and fans of Jodie Foster sometimes claim to see the seeds of her adult career in her child roles. As an adult, Foster is viewed as a unique star—a woman in control of her career, whose power and independence shine forth on the screen. Biographies of young actors often emphasize normality—hobbies, family relationships, and the like—as if to compensate for the strange, controversial nature of life as a child star. Interviews with the young Foster emphasized sports, schoolwork, and other “normal” activities, as well as her closeness to her mother. But signs of her uniqueness were already forming. Foster’s child star image may be divided into four parts: precociousness, maturity, voice and acting style, and tomboy image. Though these traits were not unprecedented (for example, Tatum O’Neal was a tomboy), when assembled, Foster’s composite star image was regarded as unique. Despite legendary acting talent, Foster has always expressed a matterof-fact attitude toward her performance style. Her style as a child was noteworthy for what she did not do, the ways she avoided techniques typical of child acting: she almost never cried; she did not play to the camera for cuteness; she did not widen her eyes or bob her head for emphasis. Foster developed a style that seemed unusually understated for a child, and as a young teen she was already comfortable in roles requiring an ironic disposition. When a controversy arose about whether she had done street research for her role in Taxi Driver, she dismissed the Method and described her no-nonsense acting style: “I’m no Method actress. I’ve always felt that if you learned your script and did well with the speech patterns and everything like that, you’d be okay. But to feel the character, I couldn’t get into

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

85

that. I think that’s dumb” (Jane Ardmore, “‘I Don’t Want to Grow Up: An Interview with Jodie Foster,” 1976, 5, Ardmore Collection, Herrick Library). Not surprisingly, Foster emphasized vocal work: from the time she was a young teen, she possessed the low, husky voice that has become her trademark. A powerful instrument, Foster’s voice contributed to the image of maturity and to her status as a tomboy type. Feminist research on the tomboy image commonly links it to positive assertive traits, such as toughness and rebelliousness. Pratibha Parmar’s film Jodie: An Icon (1996), which looks at the lesbian reception of Foster’s image, places considerable emphasis on her early work in tomboy roles. Fans interviewed in the film stress early identification with Foster the tomboy; the uniqueness of her tomboy roles; and links between her tomboyish style as a child and adult roles in The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Foster’s role in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) was small but essential to her emerging star image. In an interview for the DVD of the film, Ellen Burstyn observes that the film appeared just as the feminist movement was emerging, and she adds that at the time, it was rare for a Hollywood film to be told from a woman’s point of view. Like many New Hollywood films, Alice Doesn’t mixes genres: the musical, the western, the woman’s film, and the road picture. The film poses a dialectical relation between fantasy and realism, insisting upon the necessity of both. In addition to Alice’s pursuit of a singing career, musical references are sprinkled throughout the film, usually associated with fantasy. But the atmospheric lounges where Alice performs resemble settings from Mean Streets (1973), Scorsese’s previous film, and her thin, amateurish voice suggests the frailty and hopefulness of the character. Set in the American Southwest, and referencing the western and the road picture, Alice Doesn’t dispenses with the easy idea of freedom attached to these male genres. Alice is never at home on the road; the many departures alluded to in the film’s title come when she is forced out of her home and onto the road, because of either financial troubles or the need to flee an abusive relationship. Alice (Burstyn) is a dreamer who has to come to terms with the need for herself and her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) to survive. So she takes a waitressing job in a Tucson diner, and moves herself and her son into a motel, where the two can sometimes hear violent arguments next door. Burstyn has said that Alice’s romance with David (Kris Kristofferson), an idealized rancher and singing cowboy type, was a studio requirement. More memorable than the Alice-David romance are the relationships between Alice and the waitress Flo (Diane Ladd), and Tommy’s friendship with Audrey (Foster). The harsh, vulgar language typical of Scorsese films assumes a carnivalesque

86

CYNTHIA ERB

quality in Alice Doesn’t, functioning both as a weapon and as a sign of strength in the face of violence and abuse. Flo is a trash-talking, worldly woman who wears a crucifix made of safety pins (an emblem of spirituality evocative of the director’s barbed Catholicism), while Foster’s role as Tommy’s friend Audrey essentially parallels the role of Flo. Audrey appears as the street urchin who helps Tommy cope with past abuses. As if to emphasize Audrey’s street smarts, Scorsese uses a long tracking shot of the two children walking down a back alley as they converse. It is never clear whether Audrey is telling the truth or speaking a constant discourse of exaggeration, but the home experiences she describes are even more extreme than Tommy’s. In her characteristically sardonic voice, she describes a father who abandoned the family and a mother who “turns tricks at the Ramada Inn from three in the afternoon on.” Always ready with a rejoinder (her tag line is “Wanna get high on Ripple?”), thirteen-year-old Audrey is the first of many tough females that Foster would play. Audrey’s support of Tommy sometimes involves echoing his hardships. Later in the film, Tommy seeks out Audrey after getting into an argument with David that nearly capsizes his mother’s romance. Tommy is angry because David hit him, and Audrey’s way of offering support is to create a more extreme fantasy of retaliation: “I still think about going up to him [her father] and saying ‘Alright Harry, bend over. You’re gonna get the belt for that.’” (The two are at Audrey’s home, at last “getting high” on Ripple.) The violence and harsh language of Alice Doesn’t function somewhat differently from other Scorsese films: if we think of the film as both woman’s melodrama and comedy, the emphasis on abuse offers a realist shading of the former genre, even as carnivalesque moments of vulgarity both feed the comedy and symbolize the strength of characters facing harsh environments. Foster’s low voice and understated style made her an excellent choice for Audrey—a part that would set her career on course for similar tough roles, sometimes within feminist projects. Although the Disney comedy Freaky Friday (1976) would seem to be a departure from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, it also uses a tomboy character, this time for a more self-conscious foregrounding of feminist ideals. Freaky Friday received positive reviews, such as one in the Village Voice by Andrew Sarris, who extravagantly praised the performances of Barbara Harris and Foster: “Harris, the adult with the childlike eyes and feelings, and Foster, the child with the grown-up eyes and manner, switch roles as if they were switching souls” (4 April 1977, 41). But a negative review in Variety turned out to be more revealing. Calling Freaky Friday one of Disney’s most “offbeat” films, the critic expressed surprise that a Disney film

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

87

would touch “more directly on modern social mores, particularly on women’s lib issues, than is common for the studio” (20 December 1976, 3). This reviewer was even more outraged by the film’s “Freudian undertones”: “Lurking just below the surface are some disturbing family tensions. [Foster] hates her mother . . . and worships her father. . . . Both Harris and Foster reveal desires to escape their situations” (3). Freaky Friday was released after Foster’s controversial appearance in Taxi Driver. She finished out her Disney contract with another comedy, Candleshoe (1977), but it was becoming harder for her to appear as a Disney kid. In an interview for the DVD of Freaky Friday, Foster refers to this as a successful but difficult period. She adds that she views Freaky Friday as a transitional film between her child and adult careers, and that her own selfconsciousness and desire to move into an adult persona mirrored the desires of her character, Annabel Andrews. Although not the extreme transgressive film identified in Variety, Freaky Friday distinguishes itself by channeling the ostensibly natural, taken-for-granted concept of adolescent angst into a subtle form of feminist critique. Freaky Friday was among the first character-switching comedies, often credited with inspiring a genre tradition including Big (1988), Switch (1991), and other films. The film begins when a mother (Harris) and daughter (Foster), each believing the other has it easy, simultaneously utter the line, “I wish I could switch places with her for just one day.” Immediately Annabel’s body is inhabited by her mother Ellen, and Ellen’s body begins to house Annabel. Harris has the showier role, her housewife’s body becoming fluid, almost rubbery, as she projects Annabel’s spontaneity and athleticism. Harris jumps out of her shoes and onto a skateboard; dons a hot pink pantsuit for sliding into home plate at her son’s baseball game; sits crosslegged on a couch for a parent-teacher conference; and ends up on water skis and a parasail during a chaotic water show finale. Due to Foster’s understated style, her portrayal of Ellen-in-Annabel’s body is not as flashy as Harris’s extremely physical performance. And yet Variety’s description of Freaky Friday as a “Lolita”-type film has a certain truth: the disruption of the family emanates from the Annabel character, as the film activates parts of Foster’s star image to effect subtle forms of critique. The film opens with Foster’s voiceover narration, and this technique, combined with the character-switching theme, disperses elements of Foster’s star persona across the film. Often heard over Harris’s performance, Foster’s low, authoritative voice articulates a new psyche for the Harris character, frequently making statements that Ellen would not have made, but which she realizes to be true. With its boyish intonations, Foster’s

88

CYNTHIA ERB

throaty, sarcastic voice is used to give Harris’s feminine character the ability to comment on her husband in interior monologue. In an early scene, when Bill (John Astin) gives his wife a list of things to do for the “Aquacade” show later that day (part of his work in public relations), he is smug: “I do my job and you do yours, right?” Foster’s comment, in Ellen’s head, is a low “Oink, oink, Daddy.” As the day wears on, Bill continues to pile on tasks for his wife; when he calls to suggest that she whip up a smorgasbord in three hours, Foster’s vocal response is to call him a “male chauvinist pig,” a common phrase of the time. Foster’s own performance as Ellen-in-Annabel’s-body takes place mostly at the high school, as the new “Annabel” desperately struggles to keep up, now deprived of the real Annabel’s athletic ability and knowledge of what ordinary students do. A history class includes a political joke alluding to 1976—the nation’s bicentennial—as a crucial election year. Garbed in her red, white, and blue outfit, and now armed with her mother’s generational knowledge, Annabel (really Ellen) stands up to recite facts about American history. Since the real Annabel is something of a jock, the students are annoyed with what they regard as a pompous discourse. When Annabel (Ellen) mentions that Eisenhower’s was the first Republican administration in twenty years, the class cuts her off by noisily dropping their textbooks on the floor. This joke touched on a sensitive issue in 1976: although liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president, there was a nearly successful run for the Republican nomination by conservative Ronald Reagan, and a neoconservative movement was gaining momentum. This tension between Left and Right perspectives surfaces in other films of the year, notably Taxi Driver. Although Freaky Friday is more dedicated to matters of gender and feminism, there are moments when comic techniques are deployed for national/political critique. Freaky Friday’s feminism is strongly rooted in the way both mother and daughter participate in sports. Various scenes show one or the other skateboarding, playing field hockey, playing baseball, throwing a boomerang, water skiing, or parasailing. Because Ellen lacks Annabel’s athletic ability, comedy is produced when she fails to perform (whether in Annabel’s or her own body). But the many images of female sport create an overall sense of physical freedom and the disruption of norms. The latter is most apparent in the final Aquacade sequence: Bill had intended for the show to star Annabel. (Part of his sexism involves the displaying of his daughter, while he creates a stream of tasks for his wife to do behind the scenes.) Through a second switch, Annabel and Ellen are restored to their own bodies, just in time for the latter to find herself water skiing and parasailing, with no sense

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

89

Jodie Foster as tomboy in Freaky Friday (Gary Nelson, Walt Disney Productions, 1976). Personal collection of James Morrison.

of how to do either. Wearing a long black evening dress, Ellen/Harris skis through pyramid formations of water skiers wearing star-spangled costumes and carrying sparklers—yet another bicentennial-type display. Ellen disrupts it all, knocking over the patriotic formation, and disrupting the plans of her controlling husband. Resolution arrives when Annabel and her mother, now in their own bodies, reestablish their friendship. In the DVD interview, Foster describes Freaky Friday’s ending with sarcasm: “The end is more ‘Someday she’ll have a boyfriend and wear lipstick.’” Yet the ending does not cancel the overall impression that Annabel, a character shaped by the authority of Foster’s voice and her physical acting style, has successfully “raised the consciousness” of her housekeeping mother.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Brooke Shields, the Child-Woman in Pretty Baby

Brooke Shields projected a different “bad girl” archetype. She was repeatedly described as a child-woman, a mixture of womanly and childish traits. Director Louis Malle put it this way: “You look at her and it’s as if the head of a twenty-five-year-old woman is sitting on the body of a child” (Joan Goodman, “Pretty Baby,” New York, 26 September 1977, 33).

90

CYNTHIA ERB

In her early career, Shields was often discussed in terms of the eroticization of her image, as if she possessed a sexual knowledge that went well beyond her years. Her mother had authorized nude photographs of Shields at the age of ten for a pamphlet entitled “Little Women” (John Duka, “Brooke Shields and Company: Manufacturing a Superstar,” New York Times, 2 August 1981, 15). Around the time of Pretty Baby, the Brooke Book was published, featuring photographs of twelve-year-old Shields in adult costumes, such as one depicting her in a fur coat and platform shoes, waving a cigarette holder and saying, “I guess it’s because I look twenty-one in my first warm coat. Fur just makes me feel so fantastically sexy. You know what I mean” (Shields 85). Shields’s reputation for controversy was reinforced by her career as a model. In 1980, at the age of fifteen, she appeared in a series of television advertisements for Calvin Klein jeans. One of these, ironically, was titled “The Feminist.” As Time described it, “[Hunkering] down on the floor and [spreading] her denim-clad legs wider than a twenty-one-inch TV screen, Brooke murmurs, ‘You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing’” (“Bum’s Rush in Advertising,” 1 December 1980, 95). Shields became symbolic of the sexing and exploitation of children in the media. Yet there was a contradictory quality to this construction: her mother initially allowed nude photos of her, then sued to get them back. A photo spread in People juxtaposed a Pretty Baby still of Shields and Keith Carradine in bed with another photo of schoolgirl Brooke in pullover sweater and jeans, making a goofy face for the camera (“Her Nude Scene Is a Shocker but Brooke Shields Remains a Very Normal Little Girl,” People, 29 May 1978, 41). Even though Shields’s nude scenes in Pretty Baby were evident onscreen, her representatives insisted that she was never nude, but always had on at least a body stocking (although Malle contradicted this claim). The marketing of the young Shields involved a balancing-act combination of innocent and knowing qualities: too much sexual knowledge from the young star would tip the project into obvious exploitation. In Pretty Baby, Malle made an intelligent use of Shields’s child-woman image. In Shields’s case, her precocious sexual knowledge, along with her actionoriented performance, worked against traditional, sensationalistic preconceptions about prostitutes. Shields received positive reviews for Pretty Baby, but unsurprisingly, feminist critics attacked the film. Focusing primarily on the relationship between photographer Ernest Bellocq (Carradine) and child prostitute Violet (Shields), Robin Morgan argued that the film’s “artiness” disguised “the seamy reality, the scarring effects, the horror of this relation” (cited in Susan Brauch, “Not Such a Pretty Baby,” Ms., April 1978, 28–29). Brauch

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

91

contended that Malle “attempts to absolve the passive Bellocq by making the child the aggressor” (28–29). Pretty Baby is a visually artful depiction of prostitution that sometimes sidesteps issues of power, but the film is interesting for its amenability to a Foucauldian framework: focusing on sexual acts, Pretty Baby features a few allusions to Freud (mainly in Violet’s aggressive attachment to her mother), but for the most part, sex appears in the absence of any real concept of repression. The film is based on Al Rose’s Storyville, New Orleans, a history of the legendary red-light district of New Orleans, in which prostitution was legal from the end of the nineteenth century until 1917, the year Pretty Baby takes place. Carradine’s character was based on Storyville photographer Ernest J. “Papa” Bellocq, and Shields’s character was based on a former Storyville child prostitute named Violet. Pretty Baby draws extensively upon Bellocq’s world, both for its ethos and for narrative information. Scenes are inspired by Bellocq’s photographs in his Storyville Portraits; the brothel’s luxurious décor derives from his images. But the film makes adjustments to Bellocq’s persona: although Carradine portrays the character as effete and passive (almost asexual), this Bellocq nevertheless carries on a cinematic tradition of depicting photography as the pastime of the controlling voyeur. Whereas the real Bellocq is believed to have had a playful relationship with the prostitutes, the fictional photographer experiences passion only as a derivative of the photographic process, and even then, only when he is freezing the prostitutes into place. Pretty Baby opens with a close shot of Violet, wrapped in a shawl. From offscreen can be heard the cries of a woman, which at first appear to be orgasmic but turn out to be the cries of childbirth. Violet is presiding as her mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon), gives birth to a son. Armed with the news, Violet runs through the brothel, yelling, “It’s a boy!” This sequence establishes two major themes. First, the ambiguity of Sarandon’s opening cries suggests confusion around discourses of sex on the one hand and reproduction/family on the other. Second, although Shields first appears as a virtual emblem of the child-woman type (the shawl giving her a madonna-like appearance), her orientation toward action offsets this type. The opening sequence suggests that sex and family relationships will be constantly entwined in the house—fostering unorthodox concepts of family, as Shields looks not only to her mother but to all the prostitutes and staff of the house as part of her large extended family. Like the real Violet, Shields’s character is adamant about her possession of sexual knowledge. As we saw with the Calvin Klein ad campaign, much of Shields’s image was built around a teasing notion of a sexy teenager who

92

CYNTHIA ERB

Energy, curiosity, defiance: Brooke Shields, with Keith Carradine, in Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, Paramount Pictures, 1978). Personal collection of James Morrison.

knew a little too much. In Pretty Baby, however, Violet is aggressive and defiant about her sexual knowledge, and she uses it both to protect herself and to manipulate others. In an important scene, Violet is dressed up and initiated into prostitution when her virginity is put up for auction. While this might seem to be a horrifying moment of sexual exploitation, Violet pursues this initiation eagerly, hoping to use it to attract Bellocq’s attention away from her mother, with whom Violet has established a sexual rivalry. Rushing her womanhood is thus part of her way of claiming Bellocq. When the prostitutes try to advise Violet on handling men and sex, she becomes impatient and insists angrily, “I know what to do. Leave me alone . . . I know. I know all that.” In her modeling campaign, Shields’s images easily froze into archetypes, but in this film, her high, girlish voice, active persona, and petulant expressions project a persona that seems at times to work with the child-woman archetype, but at other times to exceed or defeat it. Whereas Foster’s subversiveness issued from her maturity, Shields’s performance is interesting more for her childishness. Encouraged by Malle, she plays Violet with an energy, curiosity, and defiance that counter expectations built on her startling beauty. Violet dominates the whorehouse, and even when her mother abandons her she seems unconcerned and in control of the male customers she

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

93

dances with. What Violet does not handle as easily is the world outside, a World War I–era ethos increasingly intruding upon the house. The ultimate discourse of “outside”—one that drives Violet out into the world—is the discourse of race. Persons of color, such as the Professor (Antonio Fargas), the “voodoo woman” Mama Mosebery (Mae Mercer), and black servants, appear throughout the film, but segregation is not acknowledged until a late scene in which the saucy Violet, showing off her sexual knowledge, tries to force her affections on Nonny (Von Eric Thomas), an African American boy her age. This leads Nonny’s mother to chew out Violet, ironically with an insistence that there are all kinds of things Violet does not know at all: “Violet, baby, you is very bold. And the way you been raised you don’t know nothin’ about the real world.” More and more, Violet’s way of arming herself with sexual knowledge comes up short when faced with real-world situations. Throughout the film, tensions are established between Bellocq’s dedication to representing prostitutes through photography, and Violet’s ways of challenging this means of representation. In early scenes at the brothel, Violet repeatedly intervenes upon the photographic process, as when she tries to pull out an unexposed glass plate negative, causing the usually passive Bellocq to strike her in fury. Now Violet is Bellocq’s model, and whether she appears clothed, clutching a doll he has given her, or nude, stretched out on a couch, the emphasis is on his control of the image, and his definition of her according to types—pretty baby or whore. Ironically Bellocq’s effort to take the nude photograph—disturbing because it is the twelve-year-old Shields—provokes violent rage in Violet, and an emotional shift back toward her absent mother. Tired of lying still, Violet breaks her pose and causes Bellocq to lose his temper. In response, Violet proceeds furiously to scratch out her mother’s face on a glass plate negative, then shatters the plate. The final scene seems to tie up loose ends, but is actually one of the most disturbing in the film. After Violet marries Bellocq, Hattie shows up, arriving from St. Louis where she has established herself as a respectable woman living with her husband and son Will. Although Bellocq protests that he must have Violet, Hattie asserts her legal right as mother. Now Violet will really discover life in the outside world. As the family stands on the railway platform, Violet appears for the first time in the dress of a young girl, her hair tied back with a bow, and her skirt reaching just below her knees. Her stepfather asks the three to pose for a family photograph, his portable camera forcing an obvious comparison with Bellocq’s. As the photo is about to be taken, Hattie leans out of the frame to tend to the crying Will.

94

CYNTHIA ERB

Standing alone in the frame, the teenage Violet poses for her stepfather, but as she does so, she tilts her head back, her expression mercurial and ambiguous. Violet is sizing this man up in the same manner she previously used for customers. We are left to wonder about the father’s motives for returning to collect the girl, and we have the sense that Violet’s training— her expertise in sizing men up and manipulating them—will be enough to protect her. The film moves from an idealized extended family in the brothel to the model of middle-class family life, suggesting the same currents of desire and power course through both.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Taxi Driver: The Tomboy Grows Up

Previous sections have demonstrated how Foster and Shields, in their archetypal images as tomboy and child-woman, contributed to films characterized by feminist and other forms of social critique. I turn now to the question of how, in the late 1970s, Foster appeared in roles that combined remnants of her tomboy image with the sort of sexing of the child just seen in Pretty Baby. In Taxi Driver and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Foster played ostensibly exploited and endangered young women, with the same determined attitude she exhibited in her tomboy roles. As Foster matured, her image evolved, and she increasingly specialized in dark, gothic films. Feminist analysis points out that the tomboy type is accepted in young girls but meets social resistance as girls mature. In Jodie: An Icon, film scholar Terry Brown comments, “What happens when the tomboy grows up? . . . the tomboyness has to be suppressed or translated into something else.” In the late seventies, Foster was enjoying tremendous accolades as an actress. As Molly Haskell wrote, “I happen to think Jodie Foster is the most exciting talent to emerge in Hollywood in the last five years, and the only female with potential star quality” (“Jodie Foster and Tatum O’Neal” 51). And yet, as Foster matured and asserted more independence, tensions accumulated around her star image—for example, in the area of glamour. She played a cabaret singer in the gangster film parody Bugsy Malone (1976), one of the few times as a teen that she submitted to traditional standards of female glamour. But Foster told interviewers how she resisted such standards: “On screen I think I look a bit odd sometimes, but I don’t brood about my looks much . . . for now, my idea of a good role is one where I can wear jeans and no makeup” (Roger Falk, “Jodie Foster, Fourteen and Provocative, Grows into Stardom,” Cosmopolitan, August 1977, 62). Foster also resisted sex scenes; much was made of her protest on the set of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane: “I walked off the set . . . [The producer] says

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

95

[we] must have sex and violence. . . . Well, I’m not going to get into that” (Peer J. Oppenheimer, “What is Jodie Foster Really Like?” Family Weekly, 16 April 1978, 7). As she matured, Foster displayed more independence and selfdetermination, onscreen and off, which met with mixed press responses. On occasion, her image also became linked with gay and bisexual discourses, sometimes from friendly quarters, sometimes not. A famous interview with Andy Warhol opened with a detailed description of Foster’s dress (jeans tucked into black leather boots, tweed jacket, newsboy cap), and moved on to a joking exchange: AW: So when are you going to get married? JF: Never, I hope. It’s got to be boring—having to share a bathroom with someone else. AW: Gee, we believe the same things. (Andy Warhol, “Jodie Foster: New Femme Fatale,” Interview, January 1977, 6)

Sometimes the media treated Foster’s fashion preferences aggressively. During a press conference for Freaky Friday at the Disney commissary, reporters grilled her about her fashion choices. They asked what type of suit she bought, whether it was “man-tailored,” what kind of shirt she wore with it, and who was depicted on the shirt she was wearing at the time (Elton John) (“Jodie Foster Interview,” 13 April 1976, 3–4, Ardmore Papers, Herrick Library). Foster had appeared in a French musical entitled Moi, fleur bleue (1977), doing her own singing in a Dietrich-type number in which she switched from a white tuxedo to a three-piece suit. When reporters for People magazine saw Foster in Rome with co-star Sydne Rome, the latter put her arm around Foster and said, “Since we’re living in a climate of feminism, it’s better to photograph two women together—the worst they can say is we’re lesbians.” People’s response was not friendly: “Time to come home, Jodie” (quoted in Kennedy 53). In Jodie: An Icon, Entertainment Weekly critic Michael Szymanski describes Foster as a modernday Dietrich because, like Marlene, she never indicates that she cares what people think of her sexuality. Always precocious, Foster was already exhibiting this quality as a teen. She seemed to prefer films that allowed her to work mostly with adults, and gothic-type stories not centrally grounded in traditional (heterosexual) romance. One example is The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. Foster’s appearance is made strange by an obvious long blond wig; a noticeable gap between her front teeth (which she tests with her tongue in an opening

96

CYNTHIA ERB

shot); and a Moroccan caftan as the closest thing to a dress in her wardrobe. The Little Girl is a B-grade thriller enlivened by Foster’s work with the young Martin Sheen in one of his 1970s bad-boy roles. The film depicts her as a girl named Rynn, who has murdered her mother and hidden her in the cellar. Rynn lives alone, dedicated to preserving her late father’s spirit. Before dying, her father had urged her to live alone and independently, and when Rynn quotes him, the lines sound much like children’s rights discourses: “Don’t give in and play their game. Fight them any way you have to, to survive.” Although the film features a romance with a boy named Mario (Scott Jacoby), the charged relationship is between Rynn and child molester Frank Hallet (Sheen). Yet The Little Girl has surprisingly little violence. Most of the film unwinds as a series of power struggles played out in Rynn’s living room with various adults challenging her way of life. Appearing in a trench coat and black turtleneck sweater, his hair hanging down in his eyes, Sheen is a stereotypical but strangely attractive child molester who tries to dominate Rynn by infiltrating her personal space—helping himself to her father’s rocker, accepting a piece of birthday cake by grasping her forearms and stroking downward, locking her in eye contact. We are not supposed to know that the child molester has met his match in the young serial killer until late in the film (which concludes when Rynn poisons Hallet); but Foster’s sullen attitude and hard, blue-eyed stare make it clear from the beginning that she is not going to be a victim. Taxi Driver, the key film of Foster’s early career, was written in the early seventies, then rewritten by Paul Schrader just before production in the summer of 1975 (Taubin 22). Featuring many topical references to New York, the film enlarges its canvas in its portrait of child prostitution. The child prostitute Iris (Foster) evokes a runaway problem that afflicted the city in the early seventies, after Minnesota mandated jail terms for prostitutes’ second offenses. This led to an exodus of young prostitutes to New York, many of whom worked in an area nicknamed the Minnesota Strip. A New York Times article depicted concerned police officers struggling to round up young female offenders and return them to their homes: “Today’s runaway is no Norman Rockwell tyke. Instead, she may well be a fourteenyear-old in hot pants on New York’s Minnesota strip” (Ted Morgan, “Little Ladies of the Night,” New York Times, 16 November 1975, 273). Although Taxi Driver is commonly regarded as one of the great films about New York, it is important to keep in mind Schrader’s Midwestern background, and the way the film implies a dynamic between a regional Midwestern America (background for both Travis Bickle, the taxi-driving protagonist [Robert De Niro] and Iris) and the city of New York.

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

97

The tomboy grows up: Foster, with Robert De Niro, in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, Columbia Pictures, 1976). Personal collection of James Morrison.

In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Hollywood released a flurry of political films and paranoid thrillers, such as The Parallax View, The Conversation (both 1974), and All the President’s Men (1976). Taxi Driver belongs to this group, but it is more ambitious, as it seeks to capture the changing political currents of its moment, while simultaneously commenting upon the male action genre (for example, Dirty Harry [1971]). In a schematic sense, the film works as a political allegory, divided into a first part governed by Travis’s inaction and propensity for spectatorship (in the taxi, in the porn theater), and a second part governed by his growing move to action—a move that can be charted out according to the changing “targets” of Travis’s attention, campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), politician Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris), and Iris. This film was released in the year of the American Bicentennial, and Taxi Driver treats that celebration in the most ironic terms. Many have noted that Betsy is a femme fatale, but her name alludes to the mythic Betsy Ross, and her navy blue, white, and red outfits meld with the décor of the political headquarters where she works. An insomniac whose impending breakdown is apparent from the beginning, Travis is no political joiner, but when he puts on jacket and tie and

98

CYNTHIA ERB

tries to look normal for Betsy, he is “flirting with” a public arena of political choice and possibility, just as when he drives his cab he becomes a strange cultural observer. Travis’s interest in Betsy leads him to follow Palantine, a politician whose preference for populist discourses may have been inspired by George McGovern or Jimmy Carter. The two parts of the film are organized around a shift from Betsy to Iris, two women so different, and yet parallel: their names suggest a transfer from patriotism to romanticism (Iris the pure flower, both women associated with the rotting fleurs du mal that Travis burns in his sink). The women are also used to suggest a shift from a wide, national framework of political choice to a narrow psychological (psychotic) framework of absolute reaction. A sequence in which Betsy and a co-worker play with matches obviously suggests a flame, or a revolution, that will not be ignited by Palantine’s campaign. This, conjoined with Betsy’s use of Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics to hail Travis as a “walking contradiction,” is part of a thread in the film that suggests traces of the counterculture, evident both in the pallid discourses of Palantine’s campaign and in cultural aspects of New York. Amy Taubin points out that aspects of the counterculture cloak the relationship between Iris and Sport (Harvey Keitel), explaining in part Travis’s attack and his struggle to reaffirm a domestic, Midwestern image of home (Norman Rockwell after all). In a sense, Taxi Driver was working with populist discourses available in 1976, but it was also forecasting their inadequacy in light of a neoconservative movement on the horizon. In a documentary on the making of Taxi Driver, Foster jokes that she cried when she saw Iris’s prostitute costume. Certainly the platform shoes, wide-brimmed floppy hat, and hot pants do not fit the tomboy image. With her flipped blond hair, Iris is something of a double for Betsy. Both women have important diner scenes with Travis, in which they show a talent for analyzing his character. But Iris appears after a horrific scene in which a husband, played by Scorsese, sits in the back of Travis’s cab outside an apartment building and utters violent racist language about his wife, who is having an affair with a black man in a room above. The character of Iris is designed in part as a reference to Natalie Wood’s Debbie in John Ford’s western The Searchers (1956), and she appears as part of a dynamic of racial violence that increasingly defines the second part of the film. Taubin points out that a scene in which Iris dances with Sport, as Travis sits in his cab outside—one of the few that break with Travis’s point of view—establishes a parallel with the earlier scene featuring the racist husband, Travis, and the wife with her lover in the apartment (66). Although this comparison turns upon a racial dynamic, it also seems that Travis’s fan-

JODIE FOSTER AND BROOKE SHIELDS

99

tasy of saving Iris ultimately becomes a political dynamic rooted in his desire to attack all the excesses he sees in Sport. Foster’s big scene—the breakfast scene in a diner with Travis—becomes a sort of face-off between the two characters, demonstrating how far Travis’s thinking has come (and degenerated) since the scenes with Betsy. The breakfast scene is one of the longest in the film and surprisingly stable in tone, given that Travis’s rampage is forthcoming. Taubin notes that Scorsese and Schrader wanted to evoke the fading of the counterculture here, so they chose a New York location near the Palladium Theatre, where young people went for rock concerts (64). Foster shows an ability, even as a twelve-year-old, to hold her own against De Niro, and as her dialogue echoes aspects of the counterculture, Travis repeatedly reacts with conservative comebacks, hectoring her on morality and conventional gender roles. Although Betsy is never shown to be more than a surface in the film, Iris becomes a different person in light of day. The permed hair has become straight, and Foster seems to wear little or no makeup. She wears a fitted tshirt with a flower pattern suggestive of Travis’s view of her as a pure flower, but her casual appearance summons up “Jodie Foster,” which is important as Iris turns out to be tougher in this scene than expected. Iris also wears outlandish green sunglasses, suggesting that like Travis, she also “sees” and issues observations. The way Iris pours sugar on toast also echoes Travis’s incessant devouring of weird junk food. The two connect in this scene in a fashion that happens nowhere else in the film, and this is because it is both a dramatic pause and summary: the two will bat lines back and forth that say a lot about the film’s project. When Foster appeared in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, her character Audrey’s favorite word was “weird.” Even more in the case of Iris, Foster speaks lines that sound like hippie slang; she is representing the counterculture. She calls Travis “square” and “narc,” and she speaks of being “hip” and stoned all the time. Iris invites Travis to get away, “I’m gonna go up to one of them communes in Vermont. Why don’t you come to the commune with me?” Iris also references astrology, calling Sport a Libra. And when Travis tries to insist that “a girl should live at home,” Iris retorts, “Haven’t you ever heard of women’s lib?” Taxi Driver makes brilliant use of Foster’s ability to glide through different types of gendered personae, as well as of the authority and maturity of her voice. Instead of just creating a caricature of the counterculture, the scene pits Travis’s hardened position of morality against Iris, a child who convincingly criticizes him. When Iris mentions women’s lib, Travis sounds like a classic conservative, “What do you mean women’s lib? You’re a young girl. You should be at home now.” When

100

CYNTHIA ERB

Travis criticizes her relationship with Sport, Iris says, “So what makes you so high and mighty? Will you tell me that? Didn’t you ever try looking at your own eyeballs in the mirror?”—an ironic line, considering the famous mirror scene and Travis’s incapacity for insight. Near the time of Taxi Driver’s opening, Newsweek published an article entitled “What Is a Neoconservative?” one of a number summarizing the emerging neoconservative movement. In 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected president, but Ronald Reagan ran an important race for the Republican nomination, backed by conservative Senator Jesse Helms. Taxi Driver’s political allegory is shrewd in the sense that it is not merely a depiction of paranoia or political fatigue. Neoconservatives were believed to share at least three traits: they were former liberals or Democrats who had moved to the Right; they abhorred the counterculture; and, angered by anti-Vietnam protest, they embraced a project of global diplomacy designed to reassert the power of the United States in the world. Taxi Driver depicts Travis as a disturbed character increasingly obsessed with asserting personal power on a public stage. The film also shows Travis moving through arenas of leftism, populism, and political choice, before ultimately asserting a hard Right stand characterized by simplistic, essential concepts of gender and home. Taxi Driver is an unusual male action film because it does not merely show action, it shows how the idea of acting gradually takes shape in the protagonist’s mind, sounding an alarm about the cultural politics of the time. ■

■

■

Taxi Driver makes a self-conscious use of the (liberated) child in order to signify a conservative reaction against the Left and the counterculture; in this, it anticipates a 1980s trend toward conservative films about children that exhibit no such political self-consciousness (for example, The Blue Lagoon [1980] and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial [1982]). Although critics often overlook them, films starring children are of interest when they use star images intelligently, as in Malle’s brilliant use of Shields’s child-woman image in Pretty Baby. Jodie Foster already displayed her considerable gift for acting as a child, and she showed the talent for playing strong victims that would extend into her adult career. AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S I would like to thank Barbara Hall, Research Archivist in the Department of Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, for help with this essay.

5 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Richard Roundtree Inventing Shaft JANS WAGER

In the film Shaft (1971), a handsome male model named Richard Roundtree (b. 1942) provided an alternative image to the integrationist roles often portrayed by Sidney Poitier that Hollywood had favored throughout the 1960s. Motivated by thoughts of a black audience eager and ready to spend lavishly to see certain kinds of imagery, the production team at Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM) wanted an assertive black hero. Roundtree, an unknown actor hungry for success, played self-confident black masculinity without requiring the money or attention an established star would demand. He helped revive the character—made famous in classic film noir (1941–58)—of a tough private eye operating according to his own code of honor, thus inaugurating neo-noir and blaxploitation, films designed to attract the newly discovered urban black audience in the early 1970s. 101

102

JANS WAGER

Roundtree’s screen persona, as well as his star image, appealed to spectators across race and gender lines, although black female spectators objected to the white woman with whom the character Shaft has sex in two of the three Shaft films. Many black actors’ careers flourished only during the brief reign of blaxploitation; Roundtree maintains a thriving career in television and film, in part because he did not himself embody the type of masculinity he represented in the Shaft films. In a sense, Roundtree epitomizes how potentially transformational cultural movements can be subverted into marketable and individualized productions. Although Roundtree eventually chafed against his type casting as John Shaft, that role signified a crucial and fleeting moment in U.S. social history. What happens to Roundtree in the seventies parallels what happens to the representations of black masculinity and militancy in U.S. popular culture: all are rendered powerless. But first came an illusion of power: Roundtree played John Shaft, “the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks.”

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

From Jazz to Funk: Shaft, Blaxploitation, and Noir

Shaft as sex machine directly opposed the image of black masculinity common in Hollywood films of the previous decade. In the wake of the civil rights battles of the early sixties, the Los Angeles Watts riots, protests against the Vietnam War, the emergence of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Hollywood had to provide black audiences with images other than those found in A Patch of Blue (1965), To Sir with Love (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Clifford Mason writes in 1967, “In all these films [Poitier] has been a showcase nigger, who is given a clean suit and a complete purity of motivation so that . . . he has all the sympathy on his side” (“Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?” New York Times, 10 Sept. 1967). For Mason, even Poitier’s investigator Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (1967) is the same type, “a good guy in a totally white world, with no wife, no sweetheart, no woman to love or kiss, helping the white man solve the white man’s problem.” Blaxploitation offered audiences a respite from pervasive images like these, serving up assertive, sexualized masculinity and generating a healthy profit. Further inspired by the success of Melvin Van Peebles’s independent film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), which—as Todd Boyd notes “was made for $500,000, but by the end of 1971 it had made $10,000,000”—Hollywood studios were quick to seek projects that would appeal to the “Black urban audience” (Boyd 20). Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), a detective yarn

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

103

directed by Ossie Davis and starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx, had already hit the screens. MGM quickly joined the rush with the script for Shaft, supposedly changing the private eye from white to black because of the profitability of Sweetback (Guerrero 91). Warner Bros.’ Superfly (1972) came soon after. Like many black actors and film workers, Roundtree sought to benefit from the film industry’s sudden passion for black-oriented films, a genre dubbed negatively as blaxploitation by “Junius Griffin, an official with the Hollywood branch of the NAACP . . . in Variety” in 1972 (Boyd 21). Black spectators wanted to see Hollywood characters other than those provided by Poitier. As Manthia Diawara asserts, blaxploitation films made “elements of empowerment, pleasure, and subversive strategies available to people oppressed because of the color of their skin” (Kolbowski 52). Elsewhere, Diawara asserts that “the Blaxploitation genre is intelligible to white spectators only if they suspend their critical judgment and identify with the black heroes like Shaft” (Diawara 213). Of course, spectators frequently identify across race, gender, and class lines. Mark Reid identifies Shaft as a commercial venture made in conjunction with whites, “a black action film produced by a major studio” designed to appeal to a “black popular, or unpoliticized, audience” (Redefining 83). At the same time, studios hoped to maintain the interest of whites. Produced by a major Hollywood studio, with whites playing major executive and creative roles, including executive producers Stirling Silliphant and Roger Lewis, producer Joel Freeman, writer Ernest Tidyman, and screenwriter John D. Black, Shaft also featured African Americans behind and in front of the camera. Successful Life photographer and director of The Learning Tree (1969) Gordon Parks served as director. As an article in the New York Post explains, blacks working behind the scenes included Parks; film editor Hugh Robertson, “nominated for an Oscar” for editing Midnight Cowboy (1969); assistant director Kurt Baker, “who has worked on the television NYPD series”; Lee Bost as “head sound man”; and Celia Bryant as “wardrobe supervisor” (Emile Milne, “New Film: A Role with Soul,” 22 February1971, 22). In the same article, Freeman claims “at least half the production staff was black” (22). In front of the camera, Muhammad Ali’s assistant trainer Drew “Blundini” Brown appears as the gunsel to Harlem gangster Bumpy Jones, played by Moses Gunn. UniWorld, a black publicity agency, handled advertising for the film, according to Reid, using “the rhetoric of Black Power to attract a black popular audience” (“Black Action Film” 30). Director Parks adds subtle sophistication to the film’s representation of urban Harlem. In a memo to screenwriter Black, Parks suggests changing

104

JANS WAGER

the name of the Harlem gangster in Shaft to “Bumpy Jones” from “Knocks Persons” (Parks memo, Joel Freeman Papers, Herrick Library, 16 November 1970, 1). Parks sees the original name as “a rather unsuccessful play on words,” but does not tell Black that Bumpy was also the nickname of successful Harlem gangster Ellsworth Johnson in the 1920s and 1930s. Johnson, according to the Philadelphia Daily News, was “hugely popular . . . known for throwing big Christmas parties for underprivileged youngsters and paying residents’ rent when they were on the verge of eviction” (Janice M. Armstrong, “The Real Rap in Bumpy,” 5 November 2007, n.p.). Parks adds a nice bit of authenticity to Shaft by having the Harlem gangster evoke a historical figure. Incidentally, like Hitchcock, Parks also inserts himself into both the films he directs for MGM, as a landlord in the first and a croupier in the second movie. As Freeman notes, “Shaft is being made for that [black] audience—but. . . . Gordon [Parks] and I hope the character of Shaft will emerge as appealing to both the black and white audience” (Connell 12). Reviving the hard-boiled investigator of film noir, making him black, and providing him with a new milieu proved immediately profitable. William Covey convincingly argues that “[b]lack neo-noir films . . . have helped reinvigorate the popular filmmaking discourse of film noir” (Covey 69). Hollywood changed its practices regarding the representations of blacks in the 1940s and 1950s due to social pressures that correspond to the cultural changes which led to blaxploitation and the revival of the hard-boiled detective in a new guise. Instead of hinting at jazz, for example, now the soundtrack was unmistakably the product of black artists, and often radically so, with “James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, and Bobby Womack providing the funk for the films of the 1970s” (Covey 64). As Covey suggests, “Shaft subjoins African American urban style to the detective genre, with funk music and hip clothing substituting for the traditional jazz and cloth raincoat of the 1940s” (64). Curtis Mayfield (Superfly) replaced the Chico Hamilton Quintet (Sweet Smell of Success [1957]); James Brown (Black Caesar [1973]) replaced Nat “King” Cole (The Blue Gardenia [1953]), and the occasional oblique references to racial tension in classic film noir become an overt part of the narrative. With an Oscar-winning score by Isaac Hayes and bebop jazz trombonist J. J. Johnson, the BarKays playing rhythm, and Hot Buttered Soul singing back-up, Shaft wanders the mean streets of New York City. He has an apartment “downtown in the Village,” an office “in midtown on Times Square; and he keeps track of the happenings uptown on his prime turf, Harlem” (Guerrero 92). His lifestyle indicates more financial success than many of

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

105

his hard-boiled colleagues from the classic years. Nevertheless, Shaft’s liminal standing in society enables him to succeed in any environment. In Out of the Past (1947), Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) had ventured into a Harlem jazz club to gather information about the femme fatale from her maid. Black detective Shaft strides into police stations, militant hangouts, midtown bars, and Harlem streets with equal cool. Like Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep [1946]), Shaft attracts the attention of women everywhere he goes. Like Marlowe and Bogart’s Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon [1941]), he is unthreatened by gay men. Bogart’s character in The Big Sleep masquerades at one point as a queer book collector; in The Maltese Falcon, he calmly notices a client’s gardenia-scented handkerchief. Shaft has an obvious friendship with a gay bartender at the No Name Bar. Assertive masculinity in classic noir and in neo-noir does not require overt homophobia. Shaft, as played by Roundtree, helps reinvigorate noir, providing a viable paradigm for hard-boiled, socially successful masculinity. This image of black masculinity was carefully manufactured, controlled, and eventually destroyed by MGM.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Richard Roundtree’s Moustache: Constructing Shaft

Tucked into one of the more than fifty files of producer Joel Freeman’s Shaft-related material at the Academy of Motion Picture’s Margaret Herrick Library is a letter dated 20 April 1971, to Freeman from makeup artist Martin Bell. Carefully pinned to the letter, with a straight pin, is a moustache. According to the letter, “It is the only one left, as Richard had three (3), two (2) disappeared mysteriously, and enclosed is the sole surviver” [sic] (Freeman papers). Freeman’s reminders from the day before include an underlined, all-caps notation of “RICHARD’S MOUSTACHE” (Freeman papers, 19 April 1971). Four months earlier, in January, Freeman’s notes on a conversation with others involved in the production indicate that, “Shaft looks great, moustache very good, clothes fine, pleased with the way he carries himself.” In addition, Freeman writes, “Hair looks good.” He goes on, “Regarding moustache, Jim [James Aubrey, president of MGM] claims that Gordon [Parks, director] and I were just trying to build up our own images” (Freeman papers, 21 January 1971). This apparent obsession with Roundtree’s moustache even makes it into the MGM press book for the film, which notes, “Roundtree is also growing a moustache, ‘for two reasons’ says Freeman, ‘One of them is that we simply want to see what he looks like with one. Secondly, it might give him a little more maturity, not

106

JANS WAGER

that he really needs it, but it might be interesting’” (Shaft MGM Press book, 1971, Herrick Library, 2). The male producers’ concern about constructing a mature image of black masculinity ties directly to perceived spectatorship as well as more personal desires. In an interview in Reel, Joel Freeman, sporting an oversized seventies moustache, discusses the process of interviewing individuals to play the role of John Shaft. Actors he considered included Rupert Crosse; former football player Bernie Casey, who eventually had more than seventy film and television credits including Cleopatra Jones (1973); prolific actor Terry Carter, whose credits would include Foxy Brown (1974) and Colonel Tigh on “Battlestar Galactica” (1978–79); John White; and Billy Dee Williams. Experience was not all that Freeman was looking for in casting this film. As he tells it, “An actor came to see us. He was a fine actor with a fine reputation, but I must say the impression we got of the man as a person was unfortunately very negative. So we agreed . . . that we were not willing to take a chance on anyone with his kind of attitude because . . . we weren’t going to be able to cope with . . . ego, or overconfidence, or whatever you want to call it—even hostility” (Connell 11). In a Life essay, Rudolph Chelminski writes that former football great Jim Brown, as well as Raymond St. Jacques, were considered for the role (“Richard Roundtree’s Big Score,” 1 September 1971, 52). Already a successful actor, Brown was, as Ed Guerrero notes, “a turbulent personality . . . entangled in off-screen sexual escapades, fist fights, and rancorous feuds on and off set” (70). According to Chelminski, “[P]recisely what it was that made [Roundtree] the preferred choice to portray the brash, wisecracking and apparently invincible private eye remains a happy mystery to Roundtree” (52). The comments of the producer make it clear that Roundtree did not present the same threat to the studio that an actor such as Brown might have. Commenting on the construction of his character for the first film by producer Freeman and director Parks, Roundtree notes, “I trust them . . . they know what comes across on film best” (press book for Shaft). All of Hollywood, following the desires of the marketplace, wanted to move away from the “saintly black man” persona of Sidney Poitier and toward “assertive black manhood” (Guerrero 75, 78). At the same time, no Hollywood producer wanted to deal with the ego that might accompany such a man, and Roundtree proved eminently malleable. Roundtree provided the Shaft production team with an unproven actor who had the potential to play the part of the “black buck” (Bogle 13) or “superspade” (Leab) without requiring much money or energy from the studio. As Roundtree was a neophyte actor, his ego did not dominate his persona. As a model, he was already familiar to black audiences, thanks to

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

107

appearances in Duke hair advertisements. Roundtree, who had been a football player in high school and at Southern Illinois University, worked in sales at Barney’s and as a model for Johnson Publications, which produced Jet, Ebony, Black Star, and Black World (press kit for City Heat [1984], Herrick Library). In Los Angeles on a modeling assignment in the late sixties he met Bill Cosby, later a backer of one of the inaugural blaxploitation films Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, who encouraged him to study acting (press kit, City Heat). In a Sepia interview, Roundtree calls Cosby “a beautiful cat,” and notes that he went back to New York and joined the Negro Ensemble Company, eventually playing Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope (Bob Lucas, “The Shaft Business,” Sepia, July 1974, 43–44). Roundtree admits that he was initially angered by Cosby’s suggestions, because “I thought I was ready. . . . I was going to be a superstar right then and there, but it turned out to be the best advice I ever had” (Walter Burrell, “Richard Roundtree: A Players Interview,” Players, 1973, 20). Although the first Shaft film would earn between $10 million and $12 million domestically in the first year, “single-handedly saving MGM from financial ruin” (Bogle 238), Roundtree earned only $12,500 for ten weeks of work (MGM Production Budget for Shaft, 13 January 1971, Herrick Library). Other sources report that Roundtree earned $13,500; in any case, the studio knew that he was underpaid. In an interoffice communication dated April 1971 to MGM assistant production manager Lindsley Parsons Jr., producer Freeman suggests the studio give Roundtree his wardrobe from the film, instead of “sell[ing] those clothes for 50% of the purchase price,” per the studio’s usual policy. Freeman goes on to assert that he feels “this is a wise decision both practically and morally” (emphasis added) noting, “Mr. Roundtree’s salary for the entire film was only $12,500.” Freeman requests that the four boxes be released to him immediately, so that he can “arrange for the pressing, etc. of these clothes before” Roundtree arrived in Los Angeles to work on looping “without compensation except for his expenses.” Regarding the second film in the franchise, a similar letter from producer Stirling Silliphant to Aubrey dated March 1972 asks the studio to “make [Roundtree] a gift” of “some furniture we used in decorating his New York apartment set,” and a refurbished car, since “Dick digs both furniture and car” (Silliphant letter 29 March 1972, Freeman papers). Silliphant goes on to remind the studio boss, in strangely sexualized and macho language, “We’ll need Mister Roundtree in this third SHAFT . . . not by the scruff of the neck, but as a frontal, ballsout friend” (Freeman papers, Herrick Library). Roundtree’s salary did increase with the second film. He agreed to seven films when he signed on with MGM. The studio produced three Shaft films

108

JANS WAGER

The “Black Bogart”: Roundtree as Shaft (Gordon Parks, MGM, 1971). Personal collection of James Morrison.

in rapid succession, following the first installment with Shaft’s Big Score (1972) and finally Shaft in Africa (1973). As Jet reports in 1971, the first film “helped make the 1971 fiscal year the most profitable the movie making firm has had since 1946” (“Shaft Lifts MGM Profits into Black,” Jet, 25 November 1971, 61). MGM magnanimously offered to double Roundtree’s salary for the second film to $25,000. Now more in tune with his value, Roundtree refused, but “Parks said he wouldn’t direct without Richard so another $25,000 was reportedly promised Tree [Roundtree] on completion of shooting” (Judy Spiegelman, Soul, “Shaft Overtakes Richard Roundtree . . . Sometimes,” 14 August 1972, 2). Movie reviewers in the popular presses enjoyed the first film and recognized Shaft as a character in the mold of early noir heroes, an influence Shaft reiterates. In the first film, Roundtree’s character identifies himself as a “spade detective,” and in the third he asserts, “I’m not James Bond, simply Sam Spade.” Mary Knoblauch headlines her Chicago Today review of Shaft with “‘Black Bogart’ debuts,” writing that the “vastly entertaining film is a curious throwback to Humphrey Bogart’s days as Sam Spade . . . no pun intended.” She goes on to gush, “As for Roundtree, he is simply fabulous.

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

109

. . . anytime Roundtree wants to swing thru [sic] my window, he’s welcome” (30 June 1971). In the Chicago Sun Times, Roger Ebert also enjoys the film, suggesting that “Shaft, as played by Richard Roundtree, belongs in the honorable tradition of Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Lew Archer and company,” and that the film “savors the private-eye genre” (1 July 1971,120). Shaft translates the genre in culturally relevant ways, and helps reignite neo-noir. But the femme fatale, crucial to the classic noir narrative, is left out. Without her, the women in Shaft include a dutiful and supportive black girlfriend, a middle-class black friend, and the obligatory white woman seeking sex with a black man. According to Ebert, Shaft includes “a thoroughly unpleasant encounter with a white pick-up, who is insulted because all black exploitation movies have to insult at least one white pick-up (And why not? Fair’s fair).” Boyd is more explicit, saying Shaft started the trend in “blaxploitation films to have heroes who have Black girlfriends whom they loved and, of course, the all-American White women whom they only fucked and for whom they had no affection at all” (25). He goes on to note, “The brothas had no problem with it, although I’m sure many sistas did” (25).

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

She’s Watching: Roundtree’s Female Spectators

Black female spectators may not have had a public venue in which to express their views. Guerrero notes “the absence of any black feminist criticism” in the early seventies (91). But the archives yield cogent feminist criticism that made it straight to the producer’s desk—one young critic assessed Shaft while still in the script revision stage. Executive producer Silliphant, who would write Shaft in Africa, sent Freeman a typewritten list of comments regarding the film. A handwritten note says, “Dear Joel, from my secretary Sammi—for whatever value her feelings (she’s black and 22) may have for you and Gordon” (Sammi’s notes, Freeman papers). Sammi does not mince words, criticizing all aspects of the film. Commenting on an early script, she criticizes the portrayal of the militants as “a joke,” complains that “there’s no reality to the conversations between the black men . . . [t]hese men could or should be white . . . [t]he entire black cast should be white, including Shaft.” Her closing note asserts that “Shaft is not a real man. . . . no real black spirit caged within . . . no pride— either of his race or his ’self.’” Her comments on the white pick-up make a similar point: “Again, why the WHITE WOMAN. . . . I don’t believe whiteblack is in vogue anymore.” The notes look as if they received careful attention—each numbered comment has at least one and sometimes two check marks next to it—except the comment regarding the white pick-up.

110

JANS WAGER

The producers may have discounted Sammi’s aversion to white-black sex because they expected it, and felt the anger of black female spectators was worth the risk. They may also have wanted to play on the trope of the sexually predatory black male stereotype in a way that titillated white and black audiences. One letter in the Freeman files indicates that some audience members were far from pleased with the black masculinity portrayed in Shaft. A handwritten letter dated 30 June 1971, begins its racist diatribe with, “your film is a monstrosity creating a superman black immage [sic] just as ‘Adolf’ did with his boys” (Freeman papers). The letter, which threatened the producers, was sent on to the Anti-Defamation League and the FBI, which apparently concluded its investigation by asserting that the writer did not exist. Certainly, in the early seventies, interracial relationships carried momentous weight. In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down race-based legal restrictions on marriage. Chief Justice Warren “delivered the opinion of the court” that, “[u]nder our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State” (Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 [1967]). Another black female spectator, Barbara Jean Gardner, writes Freeman a frank letter about Shaft after seeing it in the theater. She tells him she “thought the movie was fair, but with two unexcusable [sic] exceptions” (Freeman papers). The two exceptions include the penultimate sequence, when a black college girl does nothing but cower in the corner instead of fighting Mafia henchmen and assisting Shaft in her liberation; and the white pick-up scene. Here, Gardner treats Freeman to a one-page, singlespaced treatise about what is wrong with the sequence, including that Shaft “takes her to HIS pad and lays her”; “the next morning she’s still there”; and “[n]ot every Black man will jump at the chance to put his Black meat in a white piece of bread.” Gardner quotes Frantz Fanon, anticolonialist author of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), confirming her theoretical credentials to comment on the ideological consequences of these sequences. According to Gardner, Fanon asserts, “I wish to be acknowledged not as Black but as White. . . . When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.” She ends her letter by telling Freeman to “[t]ake care, be cool, but most of all be careful when you’re doing the next shooting, watch out for those unexcusable [sic] mistakes.” She also suggests, “[H]ow about screening me for a part in your next sequence?” Just as Gardner and Sammi had complaints about the film, female spectators at the spectacular Academy Theater in Inglewood, California, attending the first preview of Shaft on 23 May 1971, noticed the sex scene. Most

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

111

rated the film highly, with 42 out of 78 ranking the film excellent, and 26 ranking it good (First Preview, “Shaft,” Freeman papers). The combined male and female reviewers reported similar satisfaction, with 84 of 166 rating the film as excellent and 62 rating it good. Noting what they liked about the film, many of the female spectators cited the action, one stating that it was the “first good picture with black people starring,” and, of course, “Richard Roundtree,” or “the actor” (Preview Comments, Female, Freeman papers). Negative comments called the film “stereotyped black James Bond” and complained about the dialogue, which was “at times unintelligible. Maybe just as well.” At least two female spectators cited the “mixed bed scene,” and “love making with the white girl,” in reply to the question, “What did you dislike about the film?” In “Cinematic Genocide,” filmmaker Alile Sharon Larkin asserts that “Cinematic genocide keeps men and women of color apart on the screen and reinforces the connections between institutional racism and sexism” (3). She goes on to talk about how in the real world, as opposed to the world of the screen, “[w]hite women are not constantly referred to as freaks, bitches, or hos” (4). Yet the blaxploitation films provide a corrective, however dubious, to this view. In blaxploitation in general, and the first and third Shaft films in particular, white women function as sex objects. Black women fulfill the role of full-fledged partners. When Hayes sings, “Nobody understands him but his woman,” he means Shaft’s black girlfriend. Perhaps this is what Ebert means by “Fair’s fair.” After decades of portraying women of color as sexualized objects, white women are subjected to the same predictable, subordinate, sexualized roles. In a July 1974 Sepia piece promoting Shaft’s Big Score, a subsidiary headline notes, “Black women didn’t like interracial love scene,” and Score omits it, perhaps in response to that criticism (Bob Lucas, “The Shaft Business” 40). Roundtree apparently does not see how the producers constructed his character, and he defends himself in the first person: “I was in that bar, the woman came on to me. I was in the mood for balling and we went home and balled. She could have been Eurasian or anything. . . . It wasn’t an exploitation thing; Gordon Parks doesn’t do the exploitation thing” (Lucas 43). Roundtree asserts—and here he discusses his own choices—that “it affects me that black women don’t like it. . . . But,” he goes on, “I haven’t got time to get hung up on a woman’s color.” The article reports that Roundtree’s ex-wife is a white woman, although he has recently been dating black vocalist Freda Payne. The actor’s black female fans had to contend with both his onscreen and offscreen interracial relationships. While the second film omits the scene of sex with a white woman, the third revives the trope.

112

JANS WAGER

In the final film, the sexually motivated white woman who can, of course, be satisfied only by Shaft dies. As I note elsewhere, the femme fatale in film noir often pays the price for the expression and satisfaction of her desires— she is usually punished, jailed, or killed. Most reviewers, white and black, praised Roundtree and Shaft, in part for the opportunities the film offered. David Elliott in the Chicago Daily News even suggests how viewers should respond to the film: “Whites should be patient but not patronizing with a film like this, and blacks should just go ahead and get all the vicarious enjoyment they can” (“Shaft: A Hero in Black,” 30 June 1971). The film won the NAACP Image Award for motion picture of the year, with an award to Isaac Hayes for the score, and to Freeman for production. Van Peebles, not Parks, was awarded Director of the Year, for Sweet Sweetback. A few black male writers, such as Clayton Riley in the New York Times and Lerone Bennett in Ebony, criticized Shaft explicitly, raising concerns about blaxploitation in general, underscoring the eventual widespread disaffection of black community leaders with the stereotypical representations in blaxploitation. Concerns such as these, along with Hollywood’s realization that the coveted black audience would turn out to see white films such as The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973)—“megahits” supported by an audience that was “as much as 35 percent . . . black”—led to the genre’s demise before the mid-seventies (Guerrero 105). Another factor in the demise of blaxploitation cinema might be the almost complete lack of a femme fatale in its male-centered narratives. While male spectators were invited into the world of the neo-noir hard boiled detective, female spectators were left out of the equation.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

From Assertive Black Masculinity to Milquetoast

The Shaft films were made quickly in the face of an increasingly hostile reception of all blaxploitation by the NAACP, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and other social groups. In the films, the character undergoes few changes: he lives in a different apartment in each film, and the first two are set in New York, the third in New York, Paris, and Africa. Shaft remains tough-talking, smart, willing to engage in violence, and a magnet for women. He retains his moustache throughout the series, even when Roundtree reprises the character as the uncle of Samuel L. Jackson’s Shaft in the John Singleton–directed 2000 film. In the first film, the camera opens on Times Square, a bustling urban milieu with marquees for various Hollywood productions, including a Robert Redford and Lauren Hutton film, Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), The

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

113

Scalphunters (1968), a western starring Burt Lancaster and featuring Ossie Davis as “an educated black slave,” as well as various independent pictures such as the British sex comedy School for Sex (1968) and Wild Females (1968). In an interview in Isaac Julien’s 2002 documentary on blaxploitation, Baad Asssss Cinema, Quentin Tarantino denigrates this famous sequence, insisting that with music like the “Theme from Shaft,” “I’d open my damn movie.” Nevertheless, Roundtree seizes the stage in the early minutes of the film. He emerges from the subway dressed in a camel-colored cashmere turtleneck, a plaid suit, and a brown leather overcoat; he strides confidently down the sidewalk, crossing busy streets without concern for oncoming traffic. The sequence looks authentic and was “shot without closing the street”; Roundtree “actually went out every day and practiced . . . to see how much he could know about the cars without looking” (Briggs 24). Shaft immediately establishes himself as known and respected in the midtown neighborhood through his friendly relationships with a blind newspaper seller and shoeshine shop owner, both of whom warn him someone is looking for him. The plot of the film is based on the novel by Tidyman, who also wrote The French Connection (1972) and the screenplay for High Plains Drifter (1973). The first film has Shaft working for a Harlem gangster whose daughter has been kidnapped, ostensibly by black revolutionaries. In fact, the Italian mob has taken her in an effort to get a piece of illegal action uptown. Shaft’s relationship with police lieutenant Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi) reflects a stereotypical noir pattern: the captain respects the hard-boiled detective but wants to know what Shaft knows about recent criminal activities. Shaft and Androzzi’s first extended exchange takes place in the police station, after a “flunky” working for the Harlem gangster Bumpy (Moses Gunn) ends up falling from the window of Shaft’s office during a brawl. Androzzi mentions the Black Panthers and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican revolutionary group associated with the Panthers) in the conversation. Huey Newton, co-founder and leader of the Panthers, was among those who criticized the portrayal of black radicals in blaxploitation cinema. The radicals in Shaft are ineffectual and weak compared to the title character, although thanks to the suggestions of director Parks, they are at least dressed accurately. In his comments to screenwriter John Black, Parks insists that the militants’ “clothes [are] wrong; they would not be dressed in mod suits but in hippie-proletarian fashion; Levis, work shirts, sweaters, leather jackets, with natural haircuts” (Freeman papers, 16 November 1970, 2). The militant leader, Ben Buford (Christopher St. John), does not seem capable of fomenting revolution, and this is standard in blaxploitation. As William Lyne cogently argues in “No Accident: From Black Power

114

JANS WAGER

to Black Box Office,” the revolutionary potential of black politics is consistently “defanged and absorbed” or “silenced and crushed” (39). Sweetback director Van Peebles notes in Baad Asssss Cinema, “What Hollywood did was, they suppressed the political message and then added caricature, and blaxploitation was born.” Lyne effectively documents how “just as the Panthers were pushed by state violence into Cripdom [gang activity], black film became ineluctably linked to drug-dealing gangsterhood as it became corporate blaxploitation” (46). Lyne goes on to point out that “the flood of blaxploitation pictures and Hollywood’s block-booking system effectively jammed distribution channels,” ensuring that only “corporate blaxploitation” and no more independent black film made it into the multiplex (46). Roundtree’s Shaft, the creation of corporate blaxploitation, nevertheless provided audiences with an assertive, self-confident black male hero. Even so, blaxploitation consistently undermines the potential threat of black revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party. Black revolutionaries appear only in the first film of the Shaft sequence, which does everything to disempower the movement’s potential. It portrays the group as unable to hold a successful secret meeting and shows its leader Buford both saved and emasculated by Shaft, who puts him to bed in a little girl’s pink bedroom and later negotiates for him with Bumpy. Superfly (1972) portrays revolutionaries in a similar way; they are poorly organized and unthreatening in the face of the main character’s rugged individualism. The American dream is alive and well in Shaft, and in all hard-boiled detective narratives, where the individual triumphs over collective attempts to change society, for better or worse. At the end of the film, Shaft swings through a hotel window with guns blazing, saves Bumpy’s daughter from the Italian kidnappers, averts a gang war in New York, and has time for a witty exchange with Androzzi that ties back into his brief sexual liaison with the white woman. Gordon Parks also directed the second film in the franchise, Shaft’s Big Score! Originally titled The Big Bamboo and set in Jamaica, the film reflected the success of the original in prompting the studio to revert to a New York locale, include the name “Shaft” in the title, and to reprise the plot of the first film. In Score, the opening sequence cuts back and forth between a business office, a funeral parlor, and Shaft’s apartment. Shaft’s introduction comes more than two minutes into the film, with an establishing shot and pan across his darkened apartment that eventually reaches his bedside table, which contains cigarettes, a pearl-handled revolver, Essence and Ebony magazines, and a telephone. Shaft is in bed with a black woman, Arna (Rosalind Miles), the sister of Harlem numbers racket boss and funeral parlor

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

115

Roundtree in action in Shaft’s Big Score (Gordon Parks, MGM, 1972). Personal collection of James Morrison.

owner Cal Asby (Robert Kya-Hill). His death in an explosion after he has hidden $200,000 in cash in a casket during the long initial sequence introduces a narrative similar to the first film’s. Sensing an opening, the Italian mob seeks a place in the uptown numbers racket. By implication, the Italian gangsters will include drugs and prostitution in their action, ventures that Cal Asby apparently avoided in favor of less harmful gambling rackets. Bumpy and his gunsel return from the first film, while another black gambler and the suave clarinet-playing Italian boss are new characters. Shaft has a sexual interlude with the black mistress of the black gambler but does not have sex with a white woman. The film concludes with a long car, boat, and helicopter chase sequence, the deaths of the black gambler and white mobster, and Shaft’s recovery of the money, which will go, as originally intended by Asby, to a children’s hospital in Harlem. In general, the film was well received by reviewers in the popular presses, although it lacks the energy and originality of the first film. Musician Isaac Hayes did not recapture success in Shaft’s Big Score!, perhaps because he proved less accommodating than Roundtree. Letters and memos in the production files indicate that Hayes “delivered a song needed

116

JANS WAGER

for a sequence shooting two days late,” failed to keep “a single appointment,” “almost never returned calls,” and eventually “pulled out [of the project] at the last minute” (Lewis, 2 June 1972). Instead of Hayes and J. J. Johnson, Parks took over the music, although one Hayes tune remains on the soundtrack. Hayes embodied assertive masculinity; he had auditioned to play Shaft in the first film, and promoted his image as that of “a powerfully built man who gives off the feeling he knows how to take care of business” (Loraine Alderman, “Isaac Hayes: Melting Rock,” Gentleman’s Quarterly, Summer 1971, 134). Hayes apparently refused to meet the studio’s expectations and lost the opportunity to continue to produce music for the films. The television series did continue to feature the “Theme from Shaft,” and Hayes received credit and royalties from those programs. Unlike Roundtree, he did not make himself available to the producers of the Shaft franchise. The third Shaft film draws inspiration for its story directly from international news headlines. Writer/producer Stirling Silliphant’s files for Shaft in Africa in the Herrick Library include a Newsweek article from 14 August 1972, with the headline “Africa: But Is It Slavery?” The article details how “a truckload of sewing machines crossing the border from Italy to France” breaks down. Upon hearing groans, “local gendarmes broke open the rear doors [and] found 59 Africans crammed in” the back of the truck. These West African men “fill the dirty, back-breaking jobs in French factories, kitchens, and building sites that the average French worker refuses to do.” The plot of the third film, obviously inspired by the details of the news story, includes transport by truck, camel, and boat from Africa to Paris, a flaming inferno in a pension in “Little Africa,” the black slums of Paris, and a European mastermind behind the trafficking. Shaft assists an African king by masquerading as African, and allowing himself to be picked up by the slavers and imported to Europe. Shaft successfully breaks up the slavery ring and leaves its white European leader to be killed by the formerly enslaved Africans. In early sequences, Shaft, often naked, proves his strength and intelligence to the African royalty. Later, he learns to speak an African dialect, enhances his prowess with a traditional fighting stick, convinces the American-educated African princess not to forgo her sexual pleasure by undergoing the traditional clitorectomy, satisfies a European nymphomaniac as no one else ever has, and in general, does what Shaft does in New York in various exotic international locations. Neither Score nor Shaft in Africa was a financial success for the studio, which nevertheless went on to produce “Shaft” (1973) as a television series (Reid, “Action Film” 32). Roundtree made more money working in televi-

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

117

“But is it slavery?”: Shaft in Africa ( John Guillermin, MGM, 1973). Personal collection of James Morrison.

sion than he had performing Shaft on the big screen; he was paid $30,000 per episode for seven episodes. The show, produced by MGM and screened on CBS, was “one of three elements [including ‘Hawkins’] that rotated in the Tuesday [evening] . . . time period in the 1973–1974 season” (Brooks and Marsh 248). Roundtree was in good company. “Hawkins” (1973) starred Jimmy Stewart as a West Virginia lawyer, recalling his role in Anatomy of a Murder (1959). The transition deprived Roundtree’s character of his status as a sexual and assertive black man dramatically. As a Jet article notes, Shaft “emerged . . . looking clean-cut and intelligent in sports coats and sweater vests, and interchangeable with any of the middle class, bland private eyes . . . on television” (“Shaft Lifts MGM Profits into Black,” 25 November 1971, 86). According to the article, it “was just coincidental that Shaft is not a white man,” “[e]ven the pimp in the premier was white.” Roundtree acknowledges the change, saying “We had to think about family audiences and censors” in “a direct and calculated effort to ease the program into middle America” (89). On television, Roundtree’s character becomes much like the Poitier characters of the sixties, a desexualized black man who helps whites solve

118

JANS WAGER

their problems. One episode, “The Capricorn Murders,” has Shaft assisting Joanna Kirkwood (Cathy Lee Crosby) in solving the supposed death of her husband. Although the script for the episode suggested that Shaft would get the call from Joanna while “deeply involved in a poker game with four cronies. Big money and beer on the table,” the screened episode opens with Shaft in bright blue pajamas receiving the call alone in his apartment, (Script, “Shaft: The Capricorn Murders,” 15 October 1975, 7, Herrick Library). Shaft in pajamas alone at night in his apartment—no wonder audiences who knew him from the movies were disappointed. Studio records suggest the show did resonate with television audiences. According to an MGM memo, “By any standard of audience measurement, Hawkins and Shaft have emerged this Fall as two of the most popular new programs of the season” (Gersch to Katleman, 21 December 1973, 1; Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA). Among new television series, “Shaft” comes second in the Nielson ratings, just after “Kojak.” The studio did not, however, produce another season of the show, perhaps in response to widespread critical reviews. A lengthy TV Guide article details some of the negative comments, such as “Shaft on TV makes Barnaby Jones look like Eldridge Cleaver,” and the “TV Shaft . . . is the private eye in the gray flannel suit” (Dick Adler, “You Can’t Put That John Shaft on TV,” TV Guide, 20 April 1974, 26–27). Producer/writer William Read Woodfield admits, “Our job was to make all of America accept a black leading man . . . as a friend” (ibid., 27). He goes on to say, “He had to be liked enough so that in our second show, where we had a white man say, ‘I don’t take orders from niggers,’ all of American could say, ‘What is that man talking that way to my friend John Shaft’—not ‘I don’t want to see a show about racial problems’ ” (27). No one is explicit about the race of the audience that the studio is overtly seeking, but it is obviously a white middle-class audience. The producers insist they want to “make John Shaft as welcome in American households as Joe Mannix and Frank Cannon” (28). In other words, they want to make John Shaft into the very character that many black viewers had rejected in the many Poitier movies of the late sixties. Under pressure to appeal to a middle-class white television audience, the producers undermined the character they had so carefully constructed, leading to his demise. Almost everyone has heard of Shaft, and associates the handsome, moustachioed, tough-talking Richard Roundtree with the role. John Shaft, much like the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement, loses his cultural significance even as blaxploitation wanes and the Hollywood production companies return to business as usual. Roundtree epitomizes what Hollywood and mainstream television do to potentially

RICHARD ROUNDTREE

119

dangerous and profitable properties, as well as cultural movements. Just as the state marginalized the ability of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement to effect social change by the mid-seventies, Hollywood film and television successfully marginalized black masculinity, showing it as ineffectual. Shaft is reworked, revised, and eventually rendered invisible. ■

■

■

Roundtree was never the man he played in the Shaft films. Even so, he used Shaft to launch a long and successful acting career. His tough-guy persona in the Shaft films made him attractive to a wide-ranging audience in the early seventies; his easy-going personality endeared him to movie and television producers, enabling his career to thrive where other black actors languished after the blaxploitation boom. The Internet Movie Database lists fifteen productions featuring Richard Roundtree from 1970 until 1979. The total list, including those currently in production at the time of this essay, includes 129 titles. Jim Brown has a similar number of productions during the seventies: 14 features; Pam Grier has 18; Fred Williamson 22. More than any other star from the period, Roundtree banked on his success in blaxploitation from the mid-seventies on. He survived breast cancer and a double mastectomy in the nineties and went on to become a breast cancer advocate. He continues to work in television and in film today, sometimes reprising or recalling Shaft as he does in Shaft (2000) or the high school neo-noir Brick (2005), but more often in other roles. Roundtree’s Shaft represents the aspirations, stereotypes, and realities of black masculinity in the early seventies. Roundtree’s career, from super spade to high school principal, represents the realities of black masculinity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, filtered through the lens of American popular culture. AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S Many thanks to Ryan Simmons, Brian Whaley, and Grant Moss for careful reading and comments, and to Catherine McIntyre for research assistance. Thank you to the Department of English and Literature, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and University College at Utah Valley University. Thanks also to Jim Morrison. Special appreciation to Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library.

6 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Shelley Winters Camp, Abjection, and the Aging Star JAMES MORRISON

By the 1970s, every Hollywood star from the first or second generation of the sound era still living and working presented a problem for the system: could they go on being stars, or would they inevitably fall into an unseemly decline that might undermine the notion of stardom itself? In other words, would their stubborn persistence expose the false idealism underlying the ideology of stardom? Few stars had ever been able to adapt gracefully to the fact of age, usually by accepting relatively marginal “character” parts, or moving into “grand old man” or “plucky old dame” roles (like Spencer Tracy in the 1960s, or Katharine Hepburn in the 1970s). Among those who refused to go away, attribution of a certain indignity was 120

SHELLEY WINTERS

121

common—whether the star was forced to play beneath rank, or was hamming it up in the inveterate self-parody of senescence. Although stardom itself was being redefined in the seventies, the fate of aging stars revealed the very limited typology represented on the spectrum of stardom. Despite contemporary efforts to broaden that spectrum, it seemed clear that stardom would remain linked inextricably to youth. At the same time, aging stars demystified the aura of timelessness and star glamour simply by their lingering presence on the scene. Shelley Winters’s career in the seventies quintessentially illustrates the aging star’s position within the shifting terms of the system. Relegated to the margins, she alternates between appearances in a range of B-movie or exploitation fare—from the drive-in sleaze-fest Bloody Mama (1970) to the blaxploitation entry Cleopatra Jones (1973)—and small but showy roles in putatively more respectable films, such as Blume in Love (1973) or The Magician of Lublin (1979). Her most acclaimed role of the decade is in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), garnering her final Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress (after two previous wins in 1959 and 1965) and earning a Golden Globe. A reminder of former glory, this success also indicated a certain decline, since disaster films of the seventies like The Poseidon Adventure were largely a haven for aging stars working in ensembles that denied priority to any single performer and hinted that each might prove expendable in the wake of the next catastrophe. Yet Winters’s work defies easy classification. Only fifty years old in 1970, Winters was about to embark on the most active decade of her career, appearing in twenty-five films over the next ten years (as compared to nineteen in the sixties) as well as countless television and stage productions. Though critics during this period of unprecedented activity often accuse her of chewing the scenery in vehicles unworthy of her, she maintains a level of vigor in her work that belies such narratives of decline. Other aging stars often adopt a distinctly penitential attitude, as if to signal they accept their marginality (as in Charlton Heston’s increasingly stoical performances or Henry Fonda’s ever more melancholy appearances), or else they slink graciously into retirement. But Winters takes on a new Dionysian energy, reveling joyously in camp performance and eschewing any taint of shame. In previous decades, Winters was already a problematic fit in the system—part sex symbol, part Method actor, part ham—and her career progressively extends and acknowledges this anomalous status, which in many ways enables the work she does in the seventies. As a running commentary on the evolving vagaries of the star system, Winters’s late career mounts a nearly unqualified triumph in her utter refusal to disappear.

122

JAMES MORRISON

That her work is a virtual allegory of this refusal is nowhere clearer than in her many appearances on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” (1962–92). In these waning years of Photoplay (which folded in 1980) and rising years of People (which commenced publication in 1974), “The Tonight Show” served as a prime showcase for self-presentation, especially for aging stars like Winters who no longer featured prominently, or at all, in fan magazines or tabloids. As a regular guest on the show, Winters displays a persona that jibes with her work in film and informs it at a metacinematic level. Combining a self-effacing yet often abrasive wit with a bold assertiveness, she presents a version of herself as a kind of earthy diva, a camp icon in the making, promiscuous and hedonistic, who shares with the show’s host a penchant for bawdy double entendre and sly innuendo. Frequently joking about her own increasing weight, advancing age, failed marriages, and dalliances with Hollywood’s leading men—the same material that would become fodder for the two best-selling autobiographies she would publish at the start of the next decade—Winters simultaneously projects her deep belief in performance as an art form, alluding frequently to her commitment to Method acting and her stage work in serious drama. She upholds acting as an exalted art in her discussions of performance on “The Tonight Show” during this decade, even as she moves into her camp phase. In her most notorious appearance on the show, in 1975, Winters clashed with another guest, Oliver Reed. The encounter begins innocently enough following Winters’s uneventful interview with Carson, as the British actor saunters onstage and kisses Winters’s hand before taking his seat beside the host. Soon, however, though both Reed and Carson solicit Winters’s participation in their conversation, her contributions visibly and aggressively annoy Reed. While claiming to be “very intimidated by the British,” she insinuates that she and Reed have had a forgettable sexual encounter in the past, asks if Reed was under contract at RKO, and remarks that his new mustache makes him look like Hitler. Eventually, Reed shushes her violently, barking, “Will you please be quiet for one second, Madam?” Though Winters makes a comical show of being put in her place—“Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” she replies—her interruptions continue until, after dispensing a particularly enigmatic and intrusive non sequitur, she announces that she has to “leave for the theater” and abruptly departs. Thereupon, Reed mounts a screed against “women’s lib,” to the hoots and applause of the audience, interrupted one last time when Winters returns, unceremoniously pours a glass of liquid over Reed’s head, and strides off without a word.

SHELLEY WINTERS

123

Bizarre, unnerving, and exhilarating, the episode is pure Winters. From her peripheral seat, her repeated intrusions into the central action—Reed’s interview—seem both knowing and compulsive. However impatient one may be at her interruptions, it is clear they arise from her growing impatience with the proceedings, as an effort to decenter the action from her position on the sidelines. Despite her mock-submissiveness, she refuses to be put in her place, turning Reed’s efforts to humiliate her back on him even as she jokingly appears to accept his rebukes. She’s the shrill diva who won’t shut up, but her increasing shrillness is in direct response to Reed’s growing boorishness, and to the unspoken compact between Reed and Carson rooted in complacent male privilege. Even if it is less the privilege than the complacency that she assaults, she completely derails the two men’s smugness and undermines their former sense of imperviousness, just as, in her most interesting film performances, she consistently works against the smooth unfolding of ready-made plots. This episode highlights the most important dimension of Winters’s work in the seventies, her capacity to assert strong (if ambivalent) gestures of empowerment from positions of seeming marginality. Early in her career, Winters enjoyed a low-level pinup starlet fame—she made the cover of Life on 28 February 1955, lounging nude in a bubble bath while hoisting a flute of champagne. From the role that brought her greatest early acclaim as Ronald Colman’s murder victim in A Double Life (1947), however, she was cast consistently as a figure of abjection throughout her career. In A Place in the Sun (1951), for instance, she is called on to embody conflicting states—pathos and repulsiveness, where the latter bids to stir the spectator’s guilty complicity in desiring her death while the former, rhetorically, acquits it. Though Winters was hardly the only star to forge a type of celebrity from a posture of abjection, her abjection was of a special kind, with powerful overtones of a masochism so ostentatious it edges back into aggression, making the performance of excruciation a cult. Well before 1959, the year when her Oscar-winning performance in The Diary of Anne Frank made it her undisputed métier, Winters’s screen presence turned on an unmatched capacity to irritate, with a nagging obsequiousness that could turn on a dime into an overwhelming assertiveness. In her most characteristic roles, it is her insistent refusal to play the victim, manifest in her interminable demands for some meager acknowledgment, that spurs others to force her into that role. One could say that, in such performances, her very vulnerability empowers her, if it did not so often end in futile gestures of oblivious conviction—as, for instance, in the chilling murder scene in The Night of the Hunter (1955), a neo-Expressionist tableau wherein Winters lies

124

JAMES MORRISON

still with her arms crossed, transfixed with a self-induced certitude, stalwart and utterly indifferent to her killer’s impending violence—or if this vulnerability were not, in film after film, exactly what brings down upon her the brutality of others. Indeed, Winters’s characters were so dependably fated that by the seventies she was the object of a cycle of “sick jokes” turning on her tendency to expire, often underwater, in her films. (One, if memory serves, was crudely simple: “What’s dead and underwater?” “Shelley Winters.” Another joke was a riddle that required a performance: the teller flopped belly down on a bench, flailing arms and legs frantically, and then going suddenly limp. The answer to the riddle, “Who is this?” was “Shelley Winters.”) In her early roles, Winters’s characters remain oblivious to the fact that others desire her death, and her self-consciousness derives from a performative ironizing of this lack of awareness in high Method-acting style. In her later roles, her characters realize it with a vengeance—sometimes a very literal vengeance—with an ardent knowingness that is vital to Winters’s campiness in this phase of her career. Although critics routinely noted how former glamour queens or matinee idols suffered the humiliation of ending up in disreputable-seeming movies as the Old Hollywood faded away, no such lamentations of a fall from grace followed Winters’s defection to that realm. That is in part because an apotheosis in camp was already the most logical end to her career’s trajectory: the “failed” pin-up starlet remaking herself as the scenestealing character actor who perfected the art of annoyance. Out of place in the world of cheesecake—in her pin-up poses, Winters appears decidedly uneasy about being looked at in quite the manner those photos seem to solicit—she comes into her own as the bad mother, the braying matron, sexualized and sexless, often in the same avid breath.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Abjection and Catharsis

In film after film, Winters generates a range of emotion with no outlet—disappointment, frustration, resentment—but as Mrs. Rosen in The Poseidon Adventure, she plays a sympathetic grandmother whose passing provokes unambivalent tears. It is the only time in Winters’s career that her character’s death elicits straightforward pathos, yet its position in the narrative halfway through the film blunts its cathartic effect. Far from the climactic deathbed scene of melodrama’s typical martyrology—from the death of Melanie in Gone with the Wind (1939) to that of Annie in Imitation of Life (1959)—Mrs. Rosen’s demise is the first casualty among the main characters as they commence their torturous escape from a capsized

SHELLEY WINTERS

125

luxury liner. The very next scene quickly cuts off any semblance of mourning, as another obstacle must be overcome, driving the group onward to leave Mrs. Rosen’s corpse behind, and ultimately claiming further victims whose deaths are similarly under-remarked. In the Darwinian atmosphere of the seventies disaster movie, the real question the film raises is not “Who will survive?”—as its promo tagline teased—but how quickly can we forget the dead, to secure our own self-preservation? As the most sympathetic of her late-career performances, Winters’s Mrs. Rosen bears a striking resemblance to her most flamboyantly obnoxious characters. Despite her relatively restrained acting, all the familiar tics are in place: the under-the-breath reiterations; the little moans and stutters; the dithering lag-time in her responses; the manner of punctuating facial expressiveness with unpredictable moments of blankness. This continuity suggests that even at her most annoying, Winters could become endearing with a slight shift of angle. Yet it has a more disturbing implication. For most of her characters, other characters experience her as an oppressive constant nag, and it is clear that nobody wants to fulfill her desires. By contrast, Mrs. Rosen—on a leisure trip to Israel to be with her extended family, secure, married, wanting little for herself—burdens with her kindness. She acknowledges this in a line uttered with uncharacteristic modulation and charged with rue: “It comes from caring,” she says in a delicate closeup, suggesting reserves of untouched interiority and a self-awareness of her own ultimate isolation, an effect heightened by the fact that everyone seems to be ignoring her. Even as the earthy Mrs. Rosen, then, Winters connotes the abject and the sadomasochistic. Astonishingly, in debates of the early seventies leading up to the revisions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1974, a leading contributor to the new edition defined “masochist” as “a whiny individual . . . a Jewish-mother type” (quoted in Lane 45). However outrageous such a characterization may be as official policy, it clearly squares with the popular stereotypes that define Winters’s character. Despite the bower of married love and familial security in which she is ensconced, Mrs. Rosen takes no pleasure in her own security, but frets over the perceived vulnerabilities of others with a compassion they can only experience as suffocating. If the deaths of Winters’s earlier characters were a form of martyrdom, that of Mrs. Rosen is the only one that counts as self-sacrifice. In her “Jewish-mother” vigilance, her efforts to “save” everyone cause pain—whether she’s forcing people to nourish themselves or demanding that they marry (“All you need is a pretty wife!”)—and her final act, swimming through a flooded trench to clear the

126

JAMES MORRISON

way for the rest, culminates this pattern. Though Mrs. Rosen claims to have won medals for swimming, the film gets laughs with the spectacle of a rotund Winters trying to scale ship walls or ladders, and as she swims, Winters puffs out her cheeks, widens her eyes, and flaps her limbs in frog-legged undulations, emphasizing the comic incongruity of the sight of her own body in athletic motion. When a heart attack seizes her moments later, her piercing final line remarks this failure to recapture her youthful glory: “I guess I’m not the champion of the women’s swimming association any more,” she murmurs with a heartrending understatement worthy of the death of Little Nell. She may be punished for “caring,” but we—even if it was the only pleasure she could give us—are punished for laughing. The year after The Poseidon Adventure, Winters made her most outrageous screen appearance to that date in Cleopatra Jones, an entry in the blaxploitation cycle of the early seventies mixing half-hearted social consciousness with a “trash” aesthetic of campy sleaze. Not surprisingly, Winters emerges as the principal embodiment of the movie’s overall sensibility, despite appearing in only four scenes. As the lesbian drug maven Mommy, she enacts her most extravagant deconstruction of normative motherhood. Her performance is a frontal assault on the camera; every cut to her in garish close-up finds her in mid-shriek, and when she assaults one of her own ineffectual henchmen, her fist—plump as an overfed toad—jabs directly into the lens. The head of a drug cartel, she nurtures only by narcotizing, her own incessant, unmet demands for coddling always devolving into an enraged, quavering frustration that she vents in a series of increasingly abrasive brays. Over and over she hums a stock endearment to the interchangeable hired paramours that surround her: “You’re the only one who understands what Mommy really wants!” But these purrs of pseudosatisfaction explode on a dime, each time, into frenzied eruptions of anger. Nearly every line she caterwauls is stretched to the breaking point— “Heeeeee does not fear us,” she screams of a gangland rival, “theeeeeey do not fear us!”—but ends on a terse, high-pitched crescendo, to declaim that there is much more of the same to follow. Mommy vows retaliation against the title character, an African American government agent who in the first scene lays waste to the Turkish poppy field that was to yield Mommy’s biggest haul. A cross-generational drama of revenge shapes the plot, but in Cleopatra Jones, this is further exacerbated by the factor of race. Cleo (Tamara Dobson) is a militant advocate of “Black Power” who sports an extravagant Afro and wears flowing African robes, but is regarded with suspicion by other African Americans because she works for the state in its “war on drugs.” Mommy is a flagrant

SHELLEY WINTERS

127

Winters as Mommy in mid-shriek in Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, Warner Bros., 1973). Personal collection of James Morrison.

racist who, oddly, decks herself out in accoutrements smacking of black culture, down to her own multi-colored gowns, ornate jewelry, and over-thetop Afro wig—though its shocking-orange hue more befits the image of a latter-day Little Orphan Annie in decline. It is also strongly suggested that Cleo herself is a former member of Mommy’s bevy of concubines, furthering the sense of a weird symbiosis between them that is not unfamiliar in seventies cinema, where warring subcultures are often defined as coextensive rather than opposed (the vigilantes and their targets, for instance, in Taxi Driver [1976] or in the “Dirty Harry” movies). The dialectic of abjection and power so often at work in Winters’s star text is complicated by her whiteness in this relatively non-white film that claims, like others in the cycle—however opportunistically—to redress Hollywood’s legacy of racist exclusionism and segregation. This complication has a precedent in Winters’s portrayal of the mother in A Patch of Blue (1965), where her racist hatred of the notably unthreatening Sidney Poitier character is depicted as a symptom of her own marginalization by economic class, spurring her to assert an imagined superiority over another oppressed group. By emphasizing the title character’s dedication to her African roots, Cleopatra Jones explicitly rejects assimilation as the only avenue to African American empowerment and social integration. Yet Cleo also joins forces

128

JAMES MORRISON

with official authority against the renegade Mommy, her empowerment deriving not from assaults on the racist system, but from her willingness to comply with it against other marginalized elements. The film’s last scene stages a confrontation between Cleo and Mommy geared to provoke grindhouse hoots. Set in a junkyard, the scene is noteworthy in presenting its spectacle of a black woman subjugating a white woman as the spur to viewers’ primal pleasures. As so often, Winters becomes the audience’s object of vicarious sadism, but the ending of Cleopatra Jones is virtually alone in Winters’s work in prodding a riotous purgation of the accumulated repugnance Winters’s character has provoked so forcefully. In the last scene, Mommy abandons her pseudo-African garb in favor of leather boots and jacket, bringing her lesbianism back to the fore in wildly stereotypical terms just as the audience is urged to cheer her destruction. The fight between Cleo and Mommy recalls the showdown between Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge at the end of Johnny Guitar (1954), with kung-fu kicks in place of six-shooters; with Cleo’s every advantage, with every blow Mommy sustains, the spectator is cued to react with jeering approval. When Mommy’s corpse is abandoned on a trash heap, not a jot of pathos accompanies the image. In Cleopatra Jones, the dialectic of abjection and power takes on added ramifications, with Cleo as the abject-empowered, Mommy as the empowered-abject: Cleo allies with an establishment defined as racist to defeat a figment of that system’s worst nightmare, a powerful lesbian. Inevitably, their clash displaces potential energies of subversion, substituting their hostilities toward each other for any confrontation with the system that oppresses both.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Camp Horror

Though the sixties was the watershed decade for aging stars to be cast in horror films, the practice continued in the seventies with even more telling implications. Horror films of the seventies featuring stars of the classical era become, at once, more self-conscious about their own status as camp, and more evocative of a sense of dejection—an affect stoked by the greater violence the New Hollywood allowed in the horror genre. Yet this is a very particular species of camp, in which irony, theatricality, and humor function not to undercut feelings of anger or exclusion (as in Jack Babuscio’s well-known definition [121–36]), but to express a concentrated bitterness, which often emerges as a conflict between the films’ derision of their own stars, and the stars’ revelry in such roles as vehicles to express contempt for the new dispensation. Thus, the films are often explicitly about

SHELLEY WINTERS

129

violent generational conflicts, and they provide the spectacle of stars both accepting their own relegation to the status of ghosts and seeking a kind of vengeance through sadomasochistic forms of exhibitionism and histrionic self-debasement. This dynamic may be seen in the seventies work of stars like Bette Davis, Piper Laurie, Ava Gardner, Angie Dickinson, Ray Milland, Farley Granger, Walter Abel, Gregory Peck, Richard Burton, and others in horror films such as Burnt Offerings (1976), Carrie (1976), Ruby (1977), The Sentinel (1977), Dressed to Kill (1980), Frogs (1972), Arnold (1973), Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974), The Omen (1976), and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). In films such as What’s the Matter with Helen? and Who Slew Auntie Roo?—both 1971—Shelley Winters is an especially significant example because, by contrast to many of the aforementioned examples, she illustrates the distinction, which Richard Dyer draws in his work on Judy Garland and gay men, between “being camp and being seen as camp” (Heavenly Bodies 176). Much more than in her earlier roles, she participates joyously in the construction of her own image, so that the sense of dejection permeating the work of other stars in similar roles becomes in Winters’s work a performance of abjection glorified by jolts of camp self-consciousness. Four of Winters’s seventies films—The Tenant (1976) and Tentacles (1977) are the other two—are entirely camp horror: snide, baroque, and excessive within their often limited means, with bleary yet vigorous infusions of selfparody and retro styling. In many of her other roles of the decade, Winters comes off as something of a refugee from a horror film: as the title character in Bloody Mama, as Mommy in Cleopatra Jones, or as the plaintively oppressive mother in Next Stop, Greenwich Village. In nearly every case, the effects of these performances depend on a certain knowingness, on the spectator’s longstanding familiarity with Winters as a cultural fixture, and on a marked amplification of Winters’s recognizable mannerisms of speech and gesture: the nasal intonations and the tremulous, unexpected, quizzical inflections, punctuated by little stammers and grunts, with sudden eruptions of boozy laughter trailing off quickly into uncertain, passive-aggressive silences; or the stately, off-centered walk, dainty and ungainly at the same time, splitting the difference between a model’s strut and a charwoman’s shuffle, mimicking glamour and mocking it in equal measure. In its way, each of these characteristics was discernible in Winters’s earliest performances of the forties and fifties, and her self-parody differs from that of most other stars in camp horror films of the seventies to the extent that it exaggerates an already emphatic self-consciousness as a fulfillment of prior tendencies rather than a marked departure.

130

JAMES MORRISON

The Abject Maternal: Winters as the “plaintively oppressive” mother in Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, Twentieth-Century Fox, 1976). Personal collection of James Morrison.

Winters’s first excursions into camp horror occur in two films directed by Curtis Harrington, former avant-garde filmmaker and crony of Kenneth Anger and later the director of many of the most memorable episodes of the eighties television camp-fest “Dynasty” (1981). What’s the Matter with Helen? harks back to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) in many particulars, with a script by Henry Farrell—author of the novel on which the earlier film is based—and an interrogative title, a satiric treatment of seedy show-biz

SHELLEY WINTERS

131

milieus, and a pairing of two aging stars in leading roles, Winters and Debbie Reynolds. The two play the mothers of Leopold-and-Loeb-like killers who have just been convicted of murder, as recounted in an introductory send-up of the opening newsreel of Citizen Kane (1941), a parody of a parody. Vilified for the crimes of their sons, the mothers flee to Hollywood, where they open a school for aspiring child stars. While Adele (Reynolds) overcomes her trauma and flourishes in a courtship with the wealthy father of one of her students, Helen (Winters) remains fixated on the fear that she will be punished for her child’s transgressions, fantasizing a vengeful figure from the past stalking her in a quest for symbolic justice. Her gradual dissolution motivates the arch eponymous question and culminates—after she is denied absolution by an Aimee Semple McPherson–like radio evangelist (played by Agnes Moorehead)—in her accidental killing of a man she believes to be tormenting her and her subsequent murder of Adele herself. At first glance, the film appears to validate the hoariest clichés of Oedipal lore, with the implication that the crimes of the sons really are brought forth by the sins of the mothers. But in a twist redolent of the climax of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the plot reveals its true concern with displaced guilt when it transpires that Helen’s first victim, originally identified as an innocent bystander, actually was a vigilante with vengeful designs on her, and her “crime,” therefore, was legitimate self-defense. As so often in camp horror of the sixties and seventies from Psycho on, the Oedipal complex is both utterly unavoidable, a given precondition that determines absolutely, and impossible to take seriously. In What’s the Matter with Helen?, Helen’s violence is a form of revenge against Oedipus, as she has an epiphany, in a pure-Winters moment of dithering rage and terror, that her son—perversely rerouting the Oedipal complex—wants to kill her. Her epiphany is most striking as the narrative’s solution to a mystery, as if the filmmakers themselves were embarrassed by their own Freudian antics. More interesting still is how Winters’s performance works, as so often, against such compression, willfully obstructing forward progression with her insistently halting line deliveries or flamboyantly delayed reactions. What the story wants to pass over, Winters wants to dwell upon, especially when she is what the story wants to pass over. Her constant expressions of frustration or dissatisfaction often have a quality of doubling back to matters that might have seemed settled in narrative terms. A figure of the eccentric and the marginal, Winters could serve as a fruitful case study in the queer energies of the supporting player as examined by Patricia White in Uninvited: Classical Hollywood and Lesbian Representability or Judith Roof in All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels. As such,

132

JAMES MORRISON

she is a vehicle of narrative deconstruction, of climaxes that come too early (as when she is violently removed from a film at the midway point) or too late—as here, in her blocking of uni-directional narrative momentum in wild displays of the multi-directionality of desire, laying bare the impossibility of Oedipal dramas to play themselves out as predicted. Even under that rubric, however, Winters remains a problematic fit. Although lesbianism is something of a default position in her films of the seventies, as it already was for an array of aging stars from Barbara Stanwyck to (of all people) June Allyson, her gender nonconformity more often assumes an excessive, unfulfillable heterosexuality, a desire that ferments as her characters gradually see more and more how violently the given roles of girlfriend, fiancée, and mother slight them. Winters conveys little of the direct self-consciousness of Roof’s examples, comic foils such as Eve Arden or Thelma Ritter, who are invested with direct knowledge and the power to comment explicitly on narrative proceedings with a privileged wisdom. Even at their strongest, Winters’s characters lack that kind of knowingness; confusion and bluster are their stock in trade, and in this sense, Winters may be a more telling example, as her very knowingness remains elusive as a sort of “mobile middle” (in Roof’s terms) or a “supporting ground” that is, in Roof’s words, “never quite extinguished by the weight, glamour, or luminosity of the normal” (19). Jealousy, envy, and resentment—all central to the camp experience— figure crucially in Winters’s late roles, especially in What’s the Matter with Helen?, where they are linked explicitly to the melodramatics of aging. They animate camp itself in its “failed seriousness,” in Susan Sontag’s phrase (287)—a failure, that is, to achieve the status of “good” object, sublimated through a revelry in “bad” objects. Ultimately, if this redemption triumphs, camp not only disavows envy of the good object but subverts prevailing ideas of cultural value that legislate such distinctions in the first place. These dynamics churn with special feverishness in those examples of camp horror that wedge two fading stars against each other to stoke popular fantasies of tabloid rivalries, of the stars warring for close-ups or top billing, expressing their behind-the-scenes hostilities onscreen in barely concealed subtexts, with the titillating prospect any minute of a geriatric cat fight breaking out. By contrast to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, shot through with knowingness about the notorious rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, the joke in What’s the Matter with Helen? is to cull its stars from wildly different domains—the wholesome, perky, all-American (Reynolds) and the fearsome, depressive and abject (Winters)—and to thrust them together for chortling effects of comic negation.

SHELLEY WINTERS

133

“Being camp” vs. “being seen as camp”: Winters in What’s the Matter with Helen? (Curtis Harrington, Filmways/United Artists, 1971). Personal collection of James Morrison.

In their sessions with their students, a noisome gallery of talentless brats with a stable of obnoxious stage mothers in tow, Reynolds dances away at center stage in her pert taps and frilly little skirts, chipper with energy, as if it were only yesterday that she was singin’ in the rain, while Winters hunches at a piano in the corner, her furtive expression torn between jealous admiration of her co-star’s seeming agelessness and an

134

JAMES MORRISON

envious scowl. As the alliance between the pair devolves into the bitter recriminations more typical of sixties camp horror—the stars having, apparently, no one to blame but each other for their putative decline—the two species of camp that Sontag defined, the naïve and the deliberate, clash garishly. In on the joke, Winters camps proudly, even at her most deadpan, while Reynolds, out of the loop, plays it straight, a contrast that points up a key feature of Winters’s late work, its covert sense of collusiveness, its demand for an audience identification that exceeds the placement of her characters. In Winters’s subsequent collaboration with Harrington, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, comedy and horror collapse into one another, exchanging places in syncopation with sudden, inexplicable shifts among expressions of love, hostility, and aggression between generations. In the title role, Winters plays a wealthy socialite who, in a reversal of the Psycho template, keeps her little daughter’s decaying corpse entombed secretly in an attic nursery. Her annual holiday fêtes for select children from the local orphanage are coveted so dearly that two outcasts from that institution, a brother and sister, crash the party, and though the stern headmistress vows to send them into exile, Auntie Roo welcomes them into the fold. Her kindness is not repaid: the more she lavishes on them, the more they come to view her as a witch, as the film—prefiguring Angela Carter’s book The Bloody Chamber (1979) or Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves (1984)—turns into a mordant revision of “Hansel and Gretel.” After the boy witnesses Auntie Roo locked in an embrace with the hidden corpse, and as she increasingly casts the sister in the role of substitute daughter, violence escalates between the children and their would-be savior, culminating in the orphans’ trapping Auntie Roo in a bloody chamber of her own, leaving her to perish when they torch the house. Despite the title’s clear invocation of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the movie’s more telling intertexts are a later Bette Davis film, The Nanny (1965)—with a script by Hammer horror regular Jimmy Sangster, who also co-wrote Auntie Roo—and an earlier Winters film, The Night of the Hunter. Both the Nanny and Auntie Roo are members of the “avunculate,” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s coinage (52–62)—that is, “spinster” aunts or “bachelor” uncles, outside the Oedipal circuit, yet participating in it through quasiparental gestures, here viewed from within the family romance not as benevolent, altruistic, or even simply vicarious, but as a dangerously jealous pretense, a diabolical usurpation. In both films, such projections are presented as misreadings that elicit the very violence they fantasize; and they reveal nothing to envy but the mutilations of selfhood and otherness

SHELLEY WINTERS

135

attendant on the strains of upholding the Name of the Family. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? virtually remakes The Night of the Hunter with Winters, in an eerie, campy displacement, in the Robert Mitchum role. In the film’s last third, Winters shuttles between enacting avuncular tenderness and shrewish malevolence, both in registers of muffled hilarity, with no framing perspective to explain these startling alternations or to ground the shifting attitudes. The ending refuses to establish whether Auntie Roo’s death is a form of justice or an unspeakable cruelty, the murderous outcome of the children’s malicious delusions. Winters’s star turns in the Harrington films paved the way for her appearance in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, an art-horror pastiche that combines Eurotrash aesthetics with doses of late-Hollywood camp embodied in the persons of Winters, Melvyn Douglas, and Jo Van Fleet. In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Polanski had already explored the uncanny dimensions of the clash between Old and New Hollywood by casting a range of Hollywood elders as witches gleefully victimizing rising-star hipsters Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. In that film, the elders form an integrated coven; in The Tenant, each lurks in her or his separate confine, their relation to one another uncertain, the nature of their conspiracy obscure. Deliriously selfreferential, The Tenant is also corrosively elegiac, a meditation on solitude and lateness, every character isolated in an insular enclave amidst a ruined world. As the concierge of a creepy apartment building, Winters is especially at home—in her own uncanny way—in this Gothic environment, hunched in her cramped office just off the decaying foyer, watching the tenants come and go out of the corner of her vitriolic eyes with an attitude of malevolent uninterest. One of the film’s underlying jokes is that despite the atmosphere of paranoia, the sense of all-encompassing surveillance, with everyone being mysteriously watched, nobody really cares what anyone else is doing. Winters’s performance conveys this comic shading through that quality of knowing solipsism that often attends her screen presence. Though her characters are typically coarse or grotesquely earthy, Winters’s performances frequently transmit an aura of the unearthly, because of how self-contained they seem. By contrast to other Method actors whose styles are interactive, building on cues from other performers—James Dean or Montgomery Clift, for instance—Winters’s performative effects derive largely from how she telegraphs her characters’ unresponsiveness to others. Clift, Dean, and Winters may all seem to be in a world of their own, but for the men it is because they are too sensitive for the world, their every twitch and stutter showing how attuned—how too attuned—they are to those around them, from whom they

136

JAMES MORRISON

close themselves off only to keep from being hurt. In film after film, Winters cannot avoid such hurt, but it is because she is so out of synch with what’s going on around her. In her first scene in Lolita (1962), as the pretentious yet provincial Charlotte Haze, in a state of giddy flirtation she shows a room to a prospective tenant, blind to the tenant’s obvious repulsion. The first scene of The Tenant plays like a fey parody of that set-piece from Lolita, with Winters’s comical misperceptions from the earlier film translated into a galumphing, exaggerated indifference. As she shows the room to a deferential tenant played by Polanski himself, she alternates between mumbling and shouting, scuttles wearily with a humpbacked gait, her head lowered like a cow’s, and turns a dull gaze into corners of rooms, rarely deigning to glance at her timid interlocutor. At the same time, she overbears him, standing uncomfortably close, folding him into the crook of her arm and pressing him forward as she bids him with a cackle to look out the window from which the previous tenant leapt to her death. Although she barely takes notice of him, she communicates her scorn, as if his deference were an affront. And once again, it is striking how much Winters herself so often appears in tune with the film’s overall sensibility, even as she conveys her characters’ obliviousness and their disconnection from other characters. This feature of her performance style suits her ideally for the films of modernist auteurs like Kubrick and Polanski. And in The Tenant, her theater-of-the-absurd credentials, earned by her appearance (which the playwright praised) in Jean Genet’s The Balcony and her brilliant performance in Joseph Strick’s 1963 film of that play, square perfectly with Polanski’s Artaudian cinema-of-cruelty. ■

■

■

Although they run a gamut from the prim to the crude, from martyrdom to demonism, often in the same film, Winters’s late performances depend on a carnality so robust that it retains its aura of the carnivalesque even at its most pathetic or vituperative. The quintessential Winters performance of the seventies remakes fragility as power in its ultimate conviction that abjection is a scream. Everywhere in her work of this decade is a camp awareness of the absurdity of the given, or of the given as a kind of intrinsic absurdity, and of abjection as the position from which this can be recognized and disposed. From this vantage point, her apparent displays of self-abasement re-emerge as assaults on the otherness of this absurdity, even when she herself embodies it. Continually she celebrates waste, pollution, and defilement, embraces muck, throws herself into the mire, pitching herself fearlessly into the fetid bilge in The Poseidon Adventure, smearing

SHELLEY WINTERS

137

the blood of her beloved butchered rabbits in What’s the Matter with Helen?, consorting with the rotting corpse in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? with the same gusto with which she kneads offal in the kitchen. Her most characteristic performative gesture, it could be said, is the heave—those breathy, retching spasms with which she hurls her words, as if her insides were spilling out along with them. In this she fashions herself an image of the abject in something like Julia Kristeva’s most positive senses of that word: a lover of the redeemably loathsome, one who affirms by welcoming back the rejected as residua of the life-giving, a breacher of boundaries, including those between inside and outside, however stubbornly she remains always too much herself.

7 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Faye Dunaway Stardom and Ambivalence THOMAS SCHUR

In the 1970s, at the height of her film career, Faye Dunaway seduces audiences with her large eyes, her mane of honey-brown hair, her regal cheekbones. Her voice, full and deep, is both supple and commanding. Her careful diction is uncommon; she sounds as if she might be a classically trained singer. While her manner can often be brisk and expedient, it is somehow always elegant. She is beautiful and poised, yet resolute and determined. Her obvious willingness to take risks—to “get her hands dirty”—as an actress helps to mitigate her potential remoteness. Dunaway is a star in the seventies; but arguably, her star presence does not have the mass appeal of other actresses of the decade, like Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, or Barbra Streisand. These other actresses have the ability, each in her own way, to act like “ordinary” women. Dunaway, however, can never really shake her otherworldliness, a quality that makes her vulnerable to charges of frostiness and indifference. She never had the box-office clout of Fonda, Keaton, and Streisand. Perhaps things would have been different for her in the 1930s and 1940s, with contemporaries like Greta Garbo, Marlene 138

FAYE DUNAWAY

139

Dietrich, or Ingrid Bergman, women who, like Dunaway, appear more like gods than mortals, especially when projected onscreen. In seventies Hollywood, the hieratic Dunaway is a kind of anachronism, yet her stardom is made possible by such various commercial and cultural factors as auteur formalism, industrial diversification, and popular nostalgia. She spends much of the decade working with European directors, or directors inspired by European art cinema: Arthur Penn, Jerry Schatzberg, Roman Polanski, and Richard Lester. Dunaway fits right in to the modernist designs of these directors, whereas someone like Fonda often registers (albeit intriguingly) as an oddity in films made by Europeans (Roger Vadim, Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Losey). As much as Dunaway’s Old Hollywood studio glamour might represent a return of the repressed in seventies Hollywood—the birthplace of multinational conglomerate productions, the blockbuster, movie merchandising, and fast-food tie-ins—she is nevertheless not a studio actress. On one hand, this incongruity adds to her aura of mystery. (Where did she come from? How did she develop such an authoritative presence? What guided her to such sophistication and style?) On the other hand, this fact might be responsible for the decline of her stardom after the decade ended. She never really builds a successful “brand” in the seventies, because the characters she plays and the kind of movies she appears in are too different from one another. Work in the fashion industry (image-making, appropriately enough) might emerge as a leitmotif of her roles during the decade, but the wild divergence of these particular parts—from unbalanced model to notorious photographer to softhearted designer—almost seems calculated to prevent typecasting. And as much as Dunaway is recruited to support the “liberal” politics of directors like Stuart Rosenberg and Sidney Lumet, she is often ironically put in the position of representing a reactionary view of feminism: she is often asked to play a powerful woman—more specifically, an “ice queen”— who is a menace and must ultimately be put in her place. Dunaway, however, manages to play these women in a way that complicates our view of them. Perhaps this ability of Dunaway’s is precisely why she is so often cast by directors who want to expose the ambivalence that subtends so much American ideology.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Puzzle of a Downfall Child: Performance in Fragments

Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s first film, may seem anomalous even in the heady and varied

140

THOMAS SCHUR

context of the New Hollywood, but it closely resembles a canonical text of the cycle, Midnight Cowboy (1969). Both look like low-budget, independent films, but feature famous actors: Dunaway in Puzzle, Dustin Hoffman in Cowboy. (Hoffman’s co-star, Jon Voight, rises to stardom in the seventies, benefiting from Cowboy’s success, and in 1979 he co-stars with Dunaway in Franco Zeffirelli’s The Champ.) Both films borrow liberally from the stylistic arsenal of European art film, yet eschew the radical politics of Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Both are portraits of small-town hopefuls whose lives turn nightmarish after their arrival in Manhattan. And both allude to work of Andy Warhol, who is himself stranded in the seventies between abjection and fame. A number of Warhol’s “superstars” appeared in Midnight Cowboy as extras, and the film itself can be seen as a virtual remake of Flesh (1968), directed by Warhol’s collaborator Paul Morrissey. The Warhol connection is more oblique in the case of Puzzle. The milieu of Schatzberg’s film evokes the Factory in its depiction of New York high-society types. Dunaway’s character is a highfashion model who achieves the kind of success that the Warhol superstars by turns mock and envy. Yet ultimately, Dunaway’s character has much in common with superstars like Viva and Brigid Berlin: she is abandoned by the men she helped to make famous, she fades into obscurity, suffers from mental illness, struggles with addiction. She even changes her name, like so many superstars, when she arrives in New York; born Emily Mercine, she becomes Lou Andreas Sand—a name that combines allusions to Lou Andreas Salome, friend of Nietzsche, Wagner, and Rilke, and to George Sand. The film is about Lou’s tenuous identity, a subject reflected in the fractured construction of the film. Perhaps to offset the disorientation of the frequent flashbacks and flashforwards, a frame story bookends the film: one of Lou’s former lovers, Aaron Reinhardt (Barry Primus), a photographer turned director (like Schatzberg), visits her at her beach cottage, where she lives in unhappy seclusion; Aaron interviews Lou in preparation for a film that will be loosely based on her life. (In the manner of its staging, this interview further suggests Warhol’s influence, because it closely resembles Warhol’s interview of Edie Sedgwick in his 1965 film Poor Little Rich Girl.) In the frame story, Aaron treats Lou with a kind of paternal care that we might read as condescension; the opening and concluding scenes epitomize the clichéd relationship of powerful male director to vulnerable female star. Yet key scenes in the film reverse the archetype and its power dynamic; and each time, Lou is presented as a more talented director than Aaron. In these scenes, Lou achieves temporary self-possession, paradoxically by imagining a fictitious self. We see her script a fantasy in which the

FAYE DUNAWAY

141

Dunaway as object: Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Jerry Schatzberg, Universal, 1970). Personal collection of James Morrison.

role she plays might appeal to the man she is with. The pleasure she takes is not the pleasure of becoming an object, but rather the pleasure of inventing a fantasy, of creating a role. And almost every time, the man involved resents her assuming an authorial position, a recurrence that eventually leads Lou to a state of deep dejection. In one scene in the middle of the film, Lou seduces a young and possibly gay male model to liven up a lackluster photo shoot, so as to please Aaron, the photographer. In the following scene, Lou and Aaron are driving at night to some location in upstate New York where he is planning to photograph her. Lou makes up an excuse to ask Aaron to exit the highway; she has a fantasy in mind—a late-night scenario—that she wants to play out with him in a small-town bar. After they stop, Lou proposes that they enter the bar separately, pretend not to know each other, meet, then find a hotel room together to spend the night as “strangers.” We might think about Lou’s proposition as a repetition of the previous scene: in both, a woman is trying to create a fantasy with her partner to “spice up” their romance. But as this scene progresses, we realize something else, something more personal, is at stake.

142

THOMAS SCHUR

The rest of the scene cuts between Lou in the car, outlining the fantasy she wants Aaron to help her play out, and a visualization of the two performing the fantasy, improvising as they go along. The image of Dunaway sitting in the car is highly stylized: her luminous face floats in the middle of a black frame, framed in turn by a cascade of her locks that falls mainly to one side (reminiscent of Veronica Lake’s look) and also by an enormous fur collar. She is all face and no body. In Puzzle, Dunaway is almost always photographed in medium or close-up shots, so much so that it is fair to say the film fetishizes her face. She is thus required to construct her character largely through facial expressions. Lou is careful to elaborate her fantasy gradually, to better persuade Aaron. He is used to directing other people, not to playing a role under someone else’s direction, and Lou is well aware of this fact, so she has to cajole him. Dunaway relies on a measured delivery here, but despite this caution, she still manages to convey the pleasure Lou is taking in her scripting of the scene. She smiles in a striking way, as if she cannot help it (because she is having fun), even though she would like to maintain gravity, to better appeal to the serious Aaron. She smiles despite herself, as if conscious of and amused by the banality of her fantasy. The clichéd nature of her scenario raises questions about who is really authoring the fantasy: is it Lou; or is it Aaron, with Lou simply projecting the narrative she thinks will excite him; is it, for that matter, Carole Eastman, the screenwriter of the film; or Schatzberg, the director; or mass culture; or ideology; or gender? What can be said for certain is that Dunaway plays Lou in the car very differently from the imaginary character she pretends to be in Lou’s fantasy. When Aaron approaches her in the bar, he introduces himself with the ridiculous name “Mario Adonis.” In bitter contrast, the pretend name Lou gives herself is “Emily,” which we know is her birth name. Thus, we are led to wonder if the imaginary character “Emily” is in fact the “real” Lou, whereas Lou the fashion model—Lou, the seeming author of the fantasy we are witnessing—is a fiction, a “fake” Emily. Dunaway emanates graceful charm, easy sophistication, for her portrayal of Lou. For Emily, however, she adopts a more self-conscious persona: she casts her eyes around, frets a bit, speaks in a higher voice, stutters, and occasionally giggles. A pivotal moment in the scene involves an anomalous shot intercut with shots depicting “Emily” and “Mario” in their hotel room. For a brief moment we see an image of an older man who, we learn, raped Emily when she was a teenager. This is effected in a subjective point-of-view shot, from an extremely low angle, as the man lowers his face toward the camera. The shots are cut together in a shot/reverse-shot sequence to convey

FAYE DUNAWAY

143

the idea that the adult Lou suddenly becomes her younger self and sees Aaron as both a scripted “stranger” and the older man she once knew. The implications are complex and ambiguous: she is experiencing an illicit sexual encounter, as if for the first time, and not without pleasure; she is experiencing a traumatic rape in her past. Lou’s fantasy now seems to function as a form of repetition-compulsion; while this does not mean it isn’t a cliché, it does mean clichés can be intimate and indeterminate. In the sex scene, Dunaway tries to leave open multiple and contradictory ways of understanding what is happening. Even though she is restricted to performing largely through facial expressions, her performance is mobile and dynamic, traveling a circuit from confusion to disgust, through shades of fear, rapture, fury, and excitement. The sex scene, like much of the rest of the film, is cut into a montage. Dunaway’s acting style is well suited to the elliptical possibilities of film, because her performances lie as much (or more) in the individual poses she strikes as in the movements between poses. In this respect, it makes perfect sense that Schatzberg casts her as a model; there is little difference between the way Dunaway approaches the photo shoot scenes—where she shuttles between “looks”— and the other scenes in the film. As good as Dunaway is at imitating the naturalism characteristic of so many stars in New Hollywood films, she does not appear inclined toward naturalism as a philosophy of performance. As an actress in seventies Hollywood, she has no ambition to be loved or desired. Her instinct is as much against tradition as it is for easy reward. She is inclined toward experimentation; her métier is the unsettling of binaries.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Chinatown: Glamour, Secrecy, and Identity

Evelyn Mulwray is the name of the character Dunaway plays in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). There is something uncanny in the relation between the character’s name and that of the actress. They rhyme (Mulwray/Dunaway), and the surface elegance of both names is muted by an undercurrent of phoniness—the names sound simultaneously dignified and fake. This paradoxical combination of refinement and coarseness extends across the entire film. Produced at the height of the Watergate scandal, Chinatown is about the way ruthlessness often operates under the guise of propriety, and sometimes even beauty. Like a number of New Hollywood films that appear to critique American ideology, Chinatown is anticapitalist and anti-individualist to the extent that a film so slickly produced can be, and it is eccentric in its deployment of generic conventions. Chinatown

144

THOMAS SCHUR

is a lush-looking neo-noir about a private investigator, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who stumbles onto a murder that has something to do with water in Los Angeles. The dead man is Hollis Mulwray, a wealthy landowner and the city water commissioner; Dunaway plays his grieving widow. The first time Jake and Evelyn meet, he is humiliated to learn that someone has duped him by impersonating Evelyn Mulwray. In their second meeting, Jake does Evelyn a favor by lying to the police to help her avoid getting caught up in the investigation of Hollis’s death. The third time they meet—at a swanky Old Hollywood grillroom—Jake begins to interrogate Evelyn: she knows something she’s not telling him. At the start of the scene, Jake is already seated in a dark red leather wraparound booth. Evelyn’s entrance is glamorous, mysterious: she glides into the background and stands still in the middle of the frame, dressed to the nines in a long black garment cut low in the front, black gloves, a long strand of expensive pearls, and a simple black hat with a delicate black veil. The veil is almost transparent, except for a few tiny black discs sewn here and there, which look like artificial beauty marks against Dunaway’s pale skin. Dressed in expensive funereal garb, Evelyn is a wealthy widow; the question is whether or not she is a black widow, a femme fatale. To put a point on the matter, our attention is drawn to the anomaly that is the widow’s bright red lipstick, applied perfectly into a cupid’s bow. Upon Evelyn’s entrance, the maître d’ approaches her at the same moment she catches Jake’s glance. Jake first sees her, then the headwaiter notices her, but Dunaway doesn’t acknowledge him. Instead, she returns Jake’s look with an imposing intensity, as if spellbound—or as if to spellbind. This gaze of hers carries an air of authority because it is so obviously conscious and intentional; it is also startling because it is unclear what motivates its intensity. Perhaps Dunaway wishes us to believe that Evelyn seeks to control the meeting. In this case, Dunaway would have to hold some theory of the relationship between the gaze and power, and would likely assume we might respond to the gaze much as Jake might respond to Evelyn’s. Indeed, by evidence of this scene, Dunaway and Polanski—in cahoots, as it were— attach significant value to our gaze as we watch all this. They have gone to great lengths to make Evelyn a seductive object, so it stands to reason Dunaway is employing the same logic to make Evelyn a controlling subject in relation to Jake—and more importantly, to make Jake an object, a dupe. But as we eventually discover, Evelyn does have a secret, and it is important to recognize that her fetishistic appearance is as much a bid to conceal her secret as is her penetrating stare. In fact, as much as her gaze carries an air of authority as an action, possibly designed to dominate or

FAYE DUNAWAY

145

control, it also accrues authority as a spectacle—one that fascinates because it thwarts understanding. Thus, Dunaway’s performance employs both offensive and defensive means to conceal Evelyn’s secret. Dunaway’s sphinxlike stare conveys knowingness—Evelyn has authority in relation to Jake simply because she knows something he does not, which is all the more incentive for her to hide her secrets—but it also suggests defiance. Jake tells Evelyn, about their last meeting: “Something else besides the death of your husband was bothering you. You were upset but not that upset.” At this point, Dunaway drops the pretense of her gaze, while continuing to regard Jake closely. “Mr. Gittes, don’t tell me how I feel,” she says. A bit later, when she implies she had affairs during her marriage, she pauses, lights a cigarette, then adds: “I dislike the word ‘cheat.’” But the remark is complicated by the fact that Dunaway exhales while delivering the line, so that her voice is unnaturally deepened. Evelyn doesn’t want to have her feelings dictated, doesn’t want Jake to put words in her mouth. And if we interpret the constricted tone of her answer as a symptom of psychic pain, we might deduce, properly, that Evelyn is too wounded to conspire against Jake; that she is not a deliberate femme fatale. Jake misses the subtle disclosure because he’s not listening; he has trained himself to distrust inference and instinct. When Evelyn answers Jake’s questions, it is clear that Dunaway is using a mid-Atlantic accent, the kind that combines British and American pronunciations. Such accents were common in the classical Hollywood era, as studios hired vocal coaches to make everyday people sound like stars. Presumably, the British component of the accent was understood to lend the American actor a style and sophistication that he or she lacked. Dunaway’s accent, like the film itself, works as a kind of homage to Hollywood’s studio era, but also as a reminder of the strenuous illusionism of classical Hollywood. Her accent signifies that Evelyn Mulwray is rich, and its artificiality reminds us that rich Americans are in fact—Gatsby-like—newly so; nouveau riche. Stereotypically, the nouveau riche are those lacking sophistication and taste who, socially elevated, try to suppress their humble origins. A connection emerges, then, between the accent Dunaway puts on and the fact that Evelyn has a secret—a connection that extends further, from Evelyn’s particular secret to the history of American progress, a history that intermingles success and shame. In the film, all of these connections lead to the character Noah Cross (John Huston), Evelyn’s father and Hollis’s former business partner. Dunaway’s delivery combines decorum with sultriness; her accent makes whatever she says sound dignified, but her occasional breathiness

146

THOMAS SCHUR

counterpoints the stiffness. She frequently punctuates her lines with “Mr. Gittes,” an address that also serves to convey contradictory messages. On one hand, we might read this habit as a formality—part of her defensiveness—but on the other, we might read it as a gesture toward intimacy (as if incantation of his name might bind him to her). We could say that Dunaway plays Evelyn as coy in this scene, but that seems wrong because it doesn’t do justice to her evocation of the character’s deep suffering. And Evelyn isn’t naive: she might flirt with Jake, but the flirtation is either routine or alternatively, and distressingly, a symptom of desperation; she might not know who killed her husband, but she trusts no one. If she wraps herself in fox furs, twirls her cigarette between her fingers with aplomb, and cocks her head slightly to one side at just the right moment, it’s not because she is self-possessed. On the contrary, it’s because she is so fragile. In addition to the guttural “cheat” line described earlier, Dunaway uses her voice to express Evelyn’s underlying vulnerability two other times, both toward the end of the scene. Jake asks what the “C” stands for in her initials “ECM.” “C-c-c-Cross,” she replies, immediately following the stutter with an eyes-wide-open, blank stare. The significance of the tell becomes apparent as the story unfolds, but what is most unsettling about the quick repetition of the hard consonant sound—particularly in the context of the film’s ending—is its resemblance to gunfire. At the end of the scene, Jake and Evelyn are standing outside the restaurant waiting for valets to bring them their cars. In a close two-shot, both actors in profile, Jake begins to unleash his frustration. He’s not angry at Evelyn and her reticence exactly, but there is nevertheless something threatening about his rant. The actors are face to face; we might expect Evelyn to turn her head away from Jake to avoid his tirade, but she doesn’t. Once again, Dunaway looks right at him, fixing her gaze on him. She even leans toward him at the moment he is most heated, as if to kiss him, suggesting a masochistic tendency, or else that she identifies with Jake’s barely submerged rage and feels empathy toward him. For the most part, however, Dunaway remains strangely impassive until the end of the scene when Jake exits the frame. He gets into his car, and at the moment the car pulls away, she exclaims “Mr. G—ittes!” She continues to face straight ahead, toward the absent space in the frame Jake occupied only seconds before, yet she chokes on the “G,” clutching her throat and closing her eyes in pain. Evelyn’s tragedy is that she is always too early or too late; her voice betrays her, because her secret, she believes, is unspeakable. When we see Evelyn stranded in the frame, all alone with her eyes closed, we are reminded that she is an object of our gaze. And it almost appears that Dunaway is aware

FAYE DUNAWAY

147

Face to face: Dunaway, with Jack Nicholson, in Chinatown (Roman Polanski, Paramount Pictures, 1974). Personal collection of James Morrison.

of this effect when she opens her eyes suddenly but stays otherwise motionless, for several beats; she gives the impression that she is aware of, and resistant to, our looking at her, especially in her vulnerable state. If it seems Evelyn feels empathy toward Jake, it also seems Dunaway feels empathy toward Evelyn, and suspicion of us. The sound of “Mr. G—ittes!” here anticipates the awkward orgasmic cry of Dunaway’s character, Diana Christensen, in Network (1976). Diana is presented as a tightly wound neurotic network executive who orgasms prematurely during sex. Despite many important differences, there is a loose similarity between Evelyn’s and Diana’s situations in that both are caught in a double bind. We can say of each character that if she controls herself, she’s perceived as cold and calculating; if she abandons control, she’s perceived as unstable, possibly deranged. The different permutations of Dunaway’s performance in Chinatown appear aimed at exploring the contours of this double bind. Her discovery seems to be that self-possession and dispossession segue into each other so quickly that the difference—whether one is in control of oneself or not—is moot.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Network: Naturalism, Fakery, and Mass Culture

In Network, Dunaway negotiates her surroundings in dancelike movements that suggest a certain athleticism. She is almost always in

148

THOMAS SCHUR

motion, performing a ballet scored by the intonations of her own incessant speech. When her character grows excited, as she frequently does, Dunaway’s voice begins to squeak and gush, while her limbs follow suit by jumping and swaying. When Dunaway leads a meeting or talks on the phone, she delivers her lines like a speeding train, without hesitation or pause. She renders her coworkers objects; they cannot talk back any more than the desks and chairs can. When she picks up a phone, barrels through a soliloquy, and then hangs up the receiver, our attention is on the phone as a prop, and on the conversation as a narrative device. Dunaway reminds us that we are watching a movie. The big question that Network raises about Diana is whether or not she has any authentic feelings. Does Diana care about anyone other than herself? Does she even care about herself, or is she, instead, caught by a malevolent spell that we might call “ambition”? There is no question that Diana feels. Dunaway meticulously demonstrates that her character is full of emotion. In scene after scene, she holds forth about the business of television, yet the litany of specialized details and media-culture clichés is no dry affair. On the contrary, her professional discourse is transformed into high melodrama by Dunaway’s musical delivery and exaggerated gestures. It is as if Dunaway wants to force us to see that the question is not about feelings, but about authenticity. She seems to ask us: If I hesitated more, toned down my performance, exuded less confidence, would my character seem more real? Diana is the head of programming for the UBS network. She is an upand-comer who sets her sights on the network’s news division after the evening anchor (Peter Finch) becomes a pop sensation for having a nervous breakdown on the air. The head of news at UBS, Max Schumacher (William Holden), a veteran of TV broadcasting, is seduced by Diana’s forthright enthusiasm for selling soap to the masses. Diana comes on to Max by claiming a psychic told her, “I just had a fleeting vision of you sitting in an office with a craggy middle-aged man with whom you are or will be emotionally involved.” When this moment arrives, we suspect Diana is making up the story about the psychic. She has already been represented as a ruthless manipulator, and when Dunaway delivers the line she sidles up to Max’s desk like a Casanova-in-drag approaching a new conquest. We soon learn, however, that we might be wrong to question the truth of Diana’s tale. When Diana takes over the news from Max, we see that she has indeed hired the psychic to appear nightly as Sybil the Soothsayer. What if the relationship between Diana and Max is in fact an “emotional involvement,” rather than a shallow fling between a man-eater and her prey? Would it provide evidence that her feelings are, at least some-

FAYE DUNAWAY

149

times, genuine? Or, could it be that she is indeed empty inside—her outer display of feeling all an act—yet she wants to be the kind of person who has deep intimate connections, and this is why she tells the story about the psychic (that is to say, the story is a wish)? If we believe this last scenario, how do we reconcile our conviction that Diana is a fake with our contrary sense that Diana’s wish to be someone compassionate (in the future) is sincere? The film’s plot has the couple separate, then reunite, then leave the glass and steel of Manhattan for a weekend at the shore. After dinner at an inn, they retire to their room. Diana has been monologuing about her new show, “The Mao Tse-Tung Hour,” ever since leaving the city. When the two undress for bed, we see again the way Dunaway synchronizes her movements to the rhythms of her excited speech. Her performance conflates Diana’s giddiness about the show with the character’s eagerness to have sex. The question of Diana’s capacity for real feeling is set aside for the moment by a clear display of instinct: she is driven to push the boundaries of television, hard-wired to succeed. We would be mistaken, however, to assume Diana is simply letting biology take over. Throughout their lovemaking, Dunaway talks and talks and talks: nature meets its match in language, always artificial, here pushed by Dunaway to an almost meta-gloss on the hyper-rationality—and ambiguity—of modern mass culture.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Voyage of the Damned: Historical Trauma and Performative Surprise

Dunaway plays Denise Kreisler in Stuart Rosenberg’s Voyage of the Damned (1976), a drama about German Jews who take a cruise ship across the Atlantic in 1939 to escape Nazism, but who are denied entry to both Cuba and the United States. The film has a number of features in common with seventies Hollywood disaster films, including a large ensemble cast of tomorrow’s and yesterday’s stars. Dunaway is the film’s major star of the moment, a position of privilege that might explain why she receives top billing even though her role is no more or less prominent than anyone else’s. As in The Towering Inferno (1974), a film she also appears in—and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), a precursor of sorts to Voyage of the Damned—the drama depends in large part on the delimited, tightly sealed space in which the cast must wrestle with fate, while the horror depends on the fact that the characters’ intimate sufferings take place in public with strangers, the always-already horror of the Other thus compounded. The cruise ship is both a luxury hotel and a refugee camp. Like any resort or prison, the monolithic aspect of its enclosed space belies a

150

THOMAS SCHUR

labyrinth of diverse subspaces and passageways. In one scene, Dunaway walks through the narrow halls of the guest quarters and encounters a member of the crew, a porter carrying a white party dress. Dunaway’s character recognizes the dress as one that belonged to a young woman who has committed suicide on the ship. She stops the porter, who tells her that the young woman’s mother, Mrs. Rosen, has asked for the dress to be cleaned. Concerned about Mrs. Rosen, Denise visits her cabin. She finds the grieving mother (Lee Grant) cutting off all her hair, lost in a nervous breakdown. After a time, Denise slaps the woman across the face. “Listen to me,” Denise implores, “Anna is dead. She’s dead, do you hear me? But you are alive. Your husband’s waiting for you. What will he say when you’re not there?” In the next scene, Denise and her husband, Dr. Kreisler (Oskar Werner), begin to fight. She accuses him of being weak, like Mrs. Rosen and Anna, while he accuses her of being deluded. “You don’t realize,” says he, “in two days’ time when we land, the Gestapo will be waiting for us.” Denise spins around, opens a closet, and retrieves a white blouse stained with the blood of Mr. Rosen (Sam Wanamaker: earlier, he sliced his wrists on the deck of the ship and, in the process, grabbed Denise). Denise warns her husband: “Look at this. This is how it will end for all of us. We have no more time.” Then she says, with a slyness reminiscent of Lady Macbeth: “Go to the captain. Make him do something.” In the scene where Denise confronts the porter in the corridor and Mrs. Rosen in her cabin, Dunaway tends to draw her body into herself. Her gait is efficient, her elbows are pressed against her sides, and her hands are clasped in front of her. The narrowness of her svelte figure is accentuated by the close-fitting black suit she wears. The shape and color of the suit suggest the same modesty and refinement that Dunaway conveys through her compact gestures. She conforms perfectly to the restricted economy of the ship’s architecture. A detail that contrasts starkly with Dunaway’s otherwise practical yet elegant appearance is the color of her lips. Once again, she wears a shade of red that breaches the bounds of good taste. These soft, full ruby red lips, turning each encounter into a seduction scene, belong to Dunaway the movie star, not Denise the doctor’s wife. Yet they seem to condense metonymically Denise’s imaginary futures: a dalliance with a handsome young crewman (the porter); a sadomasochistic affair with a female protégé (Mrs. Rosen); a plot to marry a man (Dr. Kreisler) for power rather than love. When Denise arrives at Mrs. Rosen’s cabin with the party dress in hand, she knocks on the door several times without reply. Dunaway purses her

FAYE DUNAWAY

151

lips and looks askance, and in such a way that we realize Denise is not only uncertain about looking in on Mrs. Rosen, she is also annoyed about having to wait. Her patience wears out and she opens the door, intruding on the woman who is butchering her locks. Denise is shocked, but instead of a scream she delivers a strangled yelp. Dunaway’s eyes register trauma, but her regular deep breathing contains her character’s distress. Her ability to hold simultaneous expressions of anguish and calm is a singular achievement, because in her case, the opposing affects amplify rather than cancel each other. Dunaway does not exactly cry in this scene, but tears appear under her eyes. We see these tears suddenly, but the look in her eyes is now determination instead of dread; and what we notice about her mouth is not the ripeness of the lips, but how it gapes. Dunaway’s performance develops by an invisible process of addition and subtraction. And this process could not be more different from that of Lee Grant, who increases the intensity of her performance at a constant and predictable rate. In fact, when Dunaway grabs the ill Mrs. Rosen, pulls and pushes her, and slaps her, it is as if she wants to disrupt the continuity of Grant’s performance. Denise is shocked, but Dunaway is not, and she wants to be: the actress begins to bounce around and reach wildly toward Grant—movements that seem out of place for her character—as if to surprise Grant so as to surprise herself. Notwithstanding the sincerity of the film’s production, the classical construction of the narrative contains and displaces the horror of the Holocaust. Thus the horror of the film becomes the normalization, indeed the commodification, of supreme irrationality (systematic mass murder). Dunaway’s attempt to surprise Grant and herself is a kind of ethics; it opposes the injustice of convention, the occultation of terror by representation.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Eyes of Laura Mars: Undoing Fantasies of Mastery

The start of the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) surprises in another way. On the soundtrack we hear music by Barbra Streisand; she is of course a major recording artist at the time of the film’s release, but the song is a treacly ballad (or at least it begins as one), confounding our expectation of a darker, more suspense-building score. At the same time, there are no title credits and no opening scene; rather, we see a black-and-white, severely cropped photograph of a woman’s face. Despite a slow zoom out, we see mostly her eyes. The image is held—an extreme close-up of a woman’s eyes, so extreme as to become abstract, writ large across the screen, redolent of experimental cinema or fashion photography, not serial-killer

152

THOMAS SCHUR

movies—and then the photo dissolves into a negative image of itself (like an x-ray), which subsequently fades to black. The film is directed by Irvin Kershner and stars Dunaway as a top fashion photographer, Laura Mars, famous for sensationalizing sex and violence, who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery. Someone is killing women and arranging the crime scenes to look like copies of Laura’s photographs. And to make matters worse, Laura finds herself suffering paranormal blackouts in which she loses her sight yet sees what the killer sees. The music and still image at the start of the film are jarring in relation to genre expectations and in relation to each other. The former dissonance can be explained as an example of New Hollywood genre revisionism, reflecting the habit of subverting “classical” categories and conventions. The latter clash, between bourgeois sentiment and avant-garde formalism, is part of seventies postmodern culture, where divergent styles and attitudes freely mix. In both cases, what surprises is also what sells: Hollywood subverts genre, in part, to entice new and old audiences with the promise of something new, in the hope of increased box-office revenues. Similarly, postmodern culture effaces distinctions between “high” and “low” art to rejuvenate the sale of each. The first minutes of Eyes of Laura Mars are a minor shock, but the film goes on to contend that shock in the seventies belongs to advertising, not art. The politics of modernism, of social reform through aesthetic shocks, has dissolved into a negative image of itself. While we can explain away most of the mystery of the film’s start, the opening still image involves an enigma that is difficult to solve. Traditionally, the close-up as a device is a tool of the star system; it helps to produce the aura of the star by combining intimacy (the close view) and hyperbole (the immense scale). Yet here we fail to recognize the famous face of Faye Dunaway because of the extremity of the close-up. The audience most likely knows Dunaway is the star, but the effect of the extreme close-up is uncanny, because the audience cannot quite match what it knows with what it sees. After the still image dissolves into a negative and fades to black, we witness the first murder through the killer’s point of view (and Laura’s). Then the opening credits begin, superimposed over a scene of Laura arriving at a major exhibition of her work. The setting of the scene vaguely reproduces the hedonistic atmosphere of a seventies Manhattan disco. Yet the woman who emerges from a black limousine does not resemble the real-life actress Dunaway—who rubbed shoulders with Bianca Jagger and Halston at Studio 54. For one thing, she looks preternaturally old, well on her way to becoming a society matron. One might even say she looks like a vampire:

FAYE DUNAWAY

153

she is swathed in a long black cape with a high collar; her makeup turns her face pale except for blood-red lips. She is severe, but not self-serious. When a philistine asks Laura if her work encourages violence, Dunaway takes only the time needed to say no. She says the photographs do the opposite, but she doesn’t toss off her response or needlessly attenuate it. She doesn’t dismiss the charge, she hasn’t exactly rehearsed her answer, she’s willing to allow the complaint. Throughout the scene, the stately Dunaway glides among the guests, journalists, and models like a statue on a roving dolly. Or she floats among them like a saint to the extent that she is both of the people and not. Here and there, Laura engages in small talk—she is an artist with a work ethic and recognizes schmoozing as part of the job—but when she talks and smiles, her facial expressions work only in miniature. Her photographs may be huge, but to signal acknowledgment or amusement she resorts to the infinitesimal: a glint in the eye. In a scene that follows soon afterward, Laura does a shoot on location at Columbus Circle. She arrives early to supervise the preparations. Cultivating a shabby chic quality, Dunaway wears multiple, loose fitting layers that add bulk to her frame. Her hair is lighter colored than usual and disheveled. She wears little makeup; her eyes look tired and puffy. Overall, she looks about ten years older than she does in Network and Voyage of the Damned. When Laura consults with her assistants, she is soft-spoken and affable, yet serious. Dunaway’s delivery is straightforward and relaxed. We get the impression that Laura has been successful for a while and no longer has to worry about proving herself. She simply receives the respect of those around her, she doesn’t solicit it. Because the character she plays is so powerful, we might expect Dunaway to suggest the gender-corrected machismo of a Helmut Newton, but she does exactly the opposite. Perhaps it helps that the set of the shoot is populated almost entirely by women and gay men. The fantasy Laura and her assistants are trying to create for the camera is an aggressive one, but the temperature of the set itself is friendly and pleasant, or at least Laura does what she can to inspire cooperation and creativity. In this respect, the utopian quality of the set begins to seem like a fantasy itself—one that grinds to a halt when Laura suddenly begins to “see” through the eyes of the killer in the film. Laura treats the models and her assistants like collaborators. Dunaway’s manner is encouraging, but also slightly detached. She makes it clear that Laura is the boss, but the point- making is subtle. Dunaway’s slight distraction (she doesn’t finish sentences) and idiosyncrasy (she is compulsive with her hands) combine to help signify that Laura is special—drawing off the popular conception of the artistic “genius” as someone who is absent-minded

154

THOMAS SCHUR

“Shabby chic” and fantasies of aggression: Eyes of Laura Mars (Irvin Kershner, Columbia Pictures, 1978). Personal collection of James Morrison.

and quirky. Dunaway connects only superficially with her fellow actors in the scene, which is unusual. Typically, she is the kind of actress who depends on interaction and its surprises to motivate the development of her character. But as Laura, she trains her gaze on objects—the model’s wardrobe, her cameras, test photographs, and the like—which leads us to wonder how we feel about her. (Is she just odd or a narcissist? Do we like her or not?) To put this another way, in addition to the dystopian fantasy staged for Laura’s camera, and the “on-set” utopian one staged by Kershner for us, Dunaway stages a fantasy of mastery in her portrayal of Laura. And of all these fantasies, it’s the last one that is most clearly undermined by Laura’s “vision” of what the serial killer sees, the most traumatic of the series. The shoot itself is a lurid spectacle of garish colors, half-naked models, and absurd violence with a post-apocalyptic vibe. At one moment, when the client starts to get nervous, Laura’s agent Donald (Rene Auberjonois) tells him, “Relax. You hired this woman, let her do her work. She’s beautiful. Watch! Watch!” What is especially interesting about the moment is that Donald seems to mean, first and foremost, that Laura’s talent is beautiful to watch. What she does is beautiful. Her physical beauty, a condition of being,

FAYE DUNAWAY

155

is for the moment superseded by her work, a condition of acting. This is a reversal of the usual way Dunaway’s characters are presented, where priority is given to appearance. As if to underscore this reversal, the camera shifts emphasis from Dunaway’s face to her body. When she shoots the models, her face is hidden by the camera. But her body is extremely expressive here, perhaps even more so than the bodies of the hired models. She acts like a combat photographer in thigh-high boots, lunging to and fro. Thus, the film enacts a kind of counter-reversal: if Donald meant to acknowledge the virtues of Laura’s technique, Kershner returns focus to Dunaway’s thighs. At the same time, however, we begin to see more shots of the models and their antics, and fewer shots of Dunaway. In fact, the more the scene becomes about Laura photographing (and less about Laura the photographer), Dunaway is pushed to the edges of the frame and into the background of shots. Thus, the power of authorship (never fully identical to the author herself) is associated with a disappearance from the field of vision: power is invisible. This last point correlates with the seismic disruption of the serial killer’s point of view and its representation. In the middle of the shoot, without warning, Laura’s vision is hijacked by the killer; she sees what he sees. She is possessed by an invisible force, which shatters the illusion that Laura is a woman in control of her own destiny, a sovereign subject. The killer’s eyesight attaches to Laura through a discontinuous shot/reverse-shot structure: we see Laura in a medium close-up, facing us, looking suddenly panicked; then we see a disembodied, hazy, moving point-of-view shot (the killer is stalking his next victim). Almost as soon as the “spell” begins, it ends, but Laura is too traumatized to go on with her shoot. Dunaway expresses the horror of the moment silently. She struggles to stand up and walk. She flinches when someone asks if she is all right, then clutches her throat in exactly the same way she does as Evelyn in Chinatown. She does something else, too: during the attack and right afterward, she looks directly into the camera, addressing us. The chilling implication is that we are all vulnerable to invisible forces that can appropriate our subjectivity toward ends unknown to us, unwanted by us. Moreover, and perhaps more disturbingly, all of us sitting in the dark—watching Dunaway—are just such an invisible force. ■

■

■

Dunaway rarely plays a mother in her films. Indeed, only two of her seventies films make motherhood central: Chinatown and The Champ. This is both surprising and not. In the course of the decade, Dunaway is in her

156

THOMAS SCHUR

thirties, a typical period in which women become mothers, and of course, mothers are a staple of Hollywood films. Yet the New Hollywood, as part of the mass cultural fascination with gender in seventies America, favors single women and women without children. Dunaway onscreen, so often selfabsorbed and on edge, better fits the New Hollywood stereotypes than the old ones. But Dunaway’s lack of maternal warmth may be precisely the reason Polanski and Zeffirelli hire her. The characters she plays in these films are reluctant mothers at best. In both films, Dunaway’s love for her children registers as a stabbing pain. In The Champ, T. J. (Ricky Schroder) is the little boy abandoned for most of his life by Dunaway’s character, Annie. When T. J. hugs Annie, Dunaway chokes: the boy’s sweetness and vulnerability are impossible to swallow. You can’t reason with sweetness and vulnerability, and Dunaway insists that Annie remain reasonable even after she is reunited—fantastically, by chance—with this, her lost son. Dunaway believes in Annie’s prudence, and in fact, this restraint can be seen as a form of maternal protection, particularly given the romantic recklessness of Billy, the boy’s father (Jon Voight). To be prudent is to respect that all things in this world are conditional. Dunaway’s remoteness in The Champ makes sense, given Annie’s self-exile from the fantasy of unconditional love to which father and son give themselves over with abandon. When Billy dies at the end of the film—a fated death—T. J. is both incredulous and inconsolable, and Annie arrives to hold him. Suddenly confronted by a loss that cannot be reversed, the boy is reborn; he is like an infant in his mother’s arms. The last image of Dunaway onscreen in the seventies is a religious tableau composed in the style of the Old Masters, with Dunaway as Madonna. With her consent to impassivity in her embrace of her child, she affords the moment a radical stasis that transcends our expectations of shopping-mall cinema—and of Dunaway herself. Recall that throughout the seventies, Dunaway stutters and giggles, clutches her throat, squeaks and gushes, jumps and sways, slaps and pulls and pushes, bounces around and reaches wildly. Even in repose, she is intensely in repose. In a 1974 profile of her in People magazine, Jack Nicholson is quoted as saying: “The lady doesn’t hang back. She’s not saving anything for later. She’s open to the big jolt—she wants it” (Brad Darrach, “A Gauzy Grenade,” 29 July 1974, 35). Yet the writer of the profile goes on to comment that after the completion of Chinatown and halfway through The Towering Inferno, Dunaway “is 15 pounds underweight and, according to an actor in the cast, looks like ‘a used bolt of lightning’” (37). Dunaway’s exertions take a toll. She collapses at home during breaks from shooting, cared for there by Peter Wolf (lead vocalist for the J. Geils Band), her husband at

FAYE DUNAWAY

157

the time who is, according to the People writer, “the gentlest of nurses . . . [providing] round-the-clock intensive care—brewing the tea she barely sips, building the sandwiches she scarcely nibbles, fielding the phone while she crashes up to 18 hours a night” (37). By the end of the decade, Dunaway is exhausted. No wonder, then, that in her first role of the eighties—in Frank Sinatra’s last film, The First Deadly Sin (1980)—the actress lies prostrate. In her memoir, she writes: “I played Frank’s dying wife. . . . Never once was I out of bed. I don’t recall ever sitting up” (Dunaway and Sharkey 331).

8 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Divine Toward an “Imperfect” Stardom KARL SCHOONOVER

Divine was prone to “glamour fits.” The most iconic of these outbursts occurs in Female Trouble (1974). After sauntering onstage in front of a cheering crowd, she throws an enraged and euphoric tantrum. She begins with leaps, pratfalls, and flips on a trampoline, then assaults the audience with flaunting poses, screamed obscenities, and onanistic gestures. She tears apart a phone book, writhes around in a baby crib filled with dead fish, and taunts the audience with a gun. She fires the weapon, kills at least one audience member, and runs out amid her panicking fan base. In her fits, Divine manifests various physicalities: the posed body of the catwalk, the burlesque, the circus, and glam-rock meet the harried and Courtesy of Photofest. 158

DIVINE

159

Subject to glamour fits: Divine in Female Trouble (John Waters, Dreamland/Saliva Films, 1974). Courtesy of Photofest.

at-risk body of seventies performance art, slapstick comedy, and movie stunt work. Both ridiculous and thrilling, these fits distill the contradictory elements of Divine’s persona. As an icon, she appears simultaneously sloppy and pulled together, ugly and gorgeous, rabidly maniacal and diabolically deliberate. She terrorizes audiences but never stops them from wanting to be her. These fits also showcase the contradictory components of stardom more generally: the star image is an implosion of a real body, performed personas, recordings, and audiences. Mainstream cinema regulates this implosion, exploiting its excesses through a structure known as the star system. However, the “glamour fits” foreground how difficult it is to reduce Divine’s image to a system. There is an overt imperfection to these fits. They unleash an energy that dangerously exceeds what her original intentions have deployed. This imperfection frustrates our assignment of any simple exhibitionism to these tantrums. Her pratfalls, for example, make preplanned gestures indistinguishable from accidents. The phrase “glamour fits” combines these contradictory impulses: glamour has always meant a kind of put-on beauty, an elaborate adorning of the body that doesn’t try to conceal the efforts involved in beautification. A fit is a sudden attack where the body is overwhelmed with rage, spasms, and other uncontrollable impulses. Any attempt to analyze Divine’s stardom therefore confronts a categorical quandary. What kind of star is she? To which “star system” do her performances belong? Which industrial or critical parameters delimit her

160

KARL SCHOONOVER

star image? To whom does this image address itself? Perhaps such questions are best served by the methodologies developed to study the Hollywood star. After all, Divine’s stardom clearly cites mainstream cinema’s unattainable beauties, triggers an intense spectatorial pathos to rival that of melodrama’s finest leading ladies (such as Lana Turner) and channels what one Divine historian calls the “ectoplasmic” corporeality of Elizabeth Taylor, Jayne Mansfield, and Mae West. Like those Hollywood goddesses, Divine’s image derives as much from a palpable extradiegetic presence and intratextual resonance as it does from the figure onscreen. Because Divine is not a commodity in the same way as these other stars, the excesses of her star image are not so easily reconciled to capitalist modernity. Her stardom develops alongside, or in spite of, the industrial manufacturing of motion pictures. In order to understand what her stardom means, then, we must understand her relationship not only to the Hollywood star system, but also to the alternative modes of stardom that are particularly visible and viable to fan cultures by the seventies. She refigures and infuses the idea of celebrity, acknowledging how those cinemas marginal to Hollywood attempted to produce rival star systems. Yet her acting style refuses the pallor, ennui, and jaded monotones associated with Warhol’s underground superstars. Her frenzy endows the image with an excess that could be called “artsy,” but eschews the paced seriousness and demure sexiness of art cinema’s best-known actors. Her loyalty to John Waters in the seventies disqualifies her from the co-production promiscuity that characterizes the careers of European attractions like Jeanne Moreau or Alain Delon. Her haughtiness and brash acting style appropriate the affect of exploitation or schlocky horror-film acting. However, in film after film, she takes up too much space to qualify as a lowgenre player. Her onscreen presence always seems to declare: “Back off, this is my spectacle!” In this essay, I argue that what initially appears as a classification juggernaut is actually a constitutive feature of Divine’s stardom that defines the economic and political stakes of her onscreen image. More often than not, Divine’s presence negates, interrupts, or is diametrically opposed to the logic of the star as belonging to one particular system. Her presence flirts with, but never fully adheres to, a single mode of being a star. Instead, her image develops dialectically, negotiating a non-monogamous relationship to mainstream, low-brow, and marginal star systems. As a critical field, star studies has largely depended upon Hollywood’s economic model to ground its analysis, even when examining stars outside large-scale film industries. Divine not only proves the possibility of a subindustrial stardom, she also reveals the inadequacy of star theory. One problem with a methodology that relies upon Hollywood as the measure,

DIVINE

161

model, and progenitor of all movie stardom is that it obscures how certain star images, like Divine’s, define themselves in dialogue with pre-existing conventions of dominant and alternative forms of celebrity. From an industrial standpoint, it is not surprising that a categorically tumultuous star of this kind would emerge from the seventies. In the late sixties and throughout the seventies, the film industry was reorganizing itself for the second time since World War II. This reorganization put in flux the future of the alternative means of production, channels of distribution, venues of exhibition, and modes of reception that had been opened up in the late forties and fifties. In the years that Divine’s stardom rose, many icons of the great star system, long declining, fell into complete disrepair. Meanwhile, the period brought major changes to filmgoing: censorship loosened, pornography went mainstream, generic boundaries slackened, expectations of audience taste expanded, and the platforms for feature-film exhibition diversified dramatically (for example, home video cassettes, multiplex theaters, and pay-cable movie channels, such as HBO). Divine’s stardom emerges from these conflicts in the period’s film culture. Her star body operates among, between, and in spite of traditional categories of cinema that the late sixties and seventies put into flux. In trying to understand the place of Divine’s stardom in Waters’s early work, it is tempting to say that the sensibility of the films telegraphs a blurring of contemporaneous distinctions between Hollywood, grindhouse, art-house, and art-world happening. Recent revisions to film history argue that these distinctions were never quite as firm as we assume. They suggest that the admixture of quality, trash, irony, and viscera that leads to a Pulp Fiction postmodernity originates in the promiscuous habits and tastes of the sixties/seventies filmgoer. Is Divine a figure born from this moment of generic implosion and taste inversion? A trans-genre transsexual? Rather than blurring the lines between various types of films, Divine’s star image comments on the political implications of genre distinction and offers a critique of the period’s “new” openness to queer sexuality onscreen—whether in Hollywood venues or at the art house. I read Divine’s uncompromising presence more as a pointed critique than a postmodern pastiche. Throughout her films, this star body provides a running commentary on the politics of both making and consuming cinema in the seventies. Waters’s films draw liberally from the idioms of Hollywood, underground cinema, and art cinema, only to have Divine’s presence corrupt these idioms. Divine operates as the foil with which these films refuse to embrace any particular category of cinema. Divine’s body does not embrace hybridity as a positive value; in fact, it reveals an unspoken conspiracy among various genres, exhibition

162

KARL SCHOONOVER

practices, spectatorial modes, and their attendant cinematic devices to maintain mutual differentiation. In other words, if we find hybridity or citation in her image, we should not mistake it as a call for merger, reconciliation, or compromise. Instead, we should understand her star image as a form of striving, a method of queering cinema in a system that restricts the very terms upon which queer cinema could thrive. Thus, Divine aims at an imperfect stardom. I draw this particular use of the term “imperfect” from Julio García Espinosa’s manifesto for Cuban filmmaking, “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Written in the late sixties and published in English in 1971, García Espinosa’s treatise demands that revolutionary cinema maintain its critical distinction as much from art cinema and the avant-garde as from Hollywood. As he writes, “[I]mperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which ‘beautifully illustrates’ ideas or concepts which we already possess” (32). The praxis he outlines for imperfect cinema, I argue, helps us to recognize the radical workings of Divine’s stardom. By maintaining an imperfect stardom, Divine’s image reveals how existing genres negotiate the boundaries of a film text differently; and yet that image never commits to one version of how film impacts the viewer. In keeping the star image imperfect, then, Divine’s radical exhibitionism “shows a process” without “analyzing” it.1 Her iconic screen presence regurgitates how Hollywood celebrity, grindhouse cult stature, underground “superstardom,” and arthouse notoriety operate, and in an almost guerrilla fashion. Her presence rebukes the industrial and aesthetic sovereignties endorsed by these cinemas. Imperfect cinema, García Espinosa states, “can make use of whatever genre, or all genres” (32). Waters’s own comments underline the cultural “confusions” of his work: “Since my influences were so confusing, I ended up making low-brow movies for high-brow theatres, but I only owned up to the trashy ones as a contributing factor. I guess it is time to come out of the art closet and admit that [art] films influenced me as much as all the garbage I’ve so lovingly consumed in theaters all my life” (Waters 109).

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Quality It’s not Last Tango. —Australian poster for Pink Flamingos (1972)

Writing in the late sixties, García Espinosa proposed that Cuban films had begun to pander to the aesthetic “perfection” of Hollywood

DIVINE

163

and European art cinema. He urged his readers to examine the political ramifications of striving for industrial standards of quality. It is hard for any film not made by large-scale industry to look like cinema to the accustomed eyes of consumers: these less-than-perfect films are not only marked by their amateur incompetencies but also felt to be unwatchable. For García Espinosa, however, any recourse to universal production standards is ideological, indeed reactionary. When we think we are exercising commonsense discretion, we are inadvertently maintaining the boundaries of production, excluding from the marketplace films produced outside of the industry. Thus an otherwise innocuous attribute—“well-crafted”—becomes a crucial target for García Espinosa: it is a primary means by which the capitalist film industry concentrates wealth, limits access to the means of production, and excludes the majority of its customers from making their own entertainment. García Espinosa attempts to overturn quality discernment by suggesting the following strategy to his reader: when you see perfection in a film, be aware that you are watching reactionary cinema. It is in this context that he proposes “an imperfect cinema,” a cinema that refuses to qualify as well-made, that actively evades standards of the quality commodity, and in doing so, opens up a cultural space where other forms of experience can guide film-making and viewing.2 Similar to García Espinosa’s imperfect cinema, the “trash aesthetics” developed in the Waters/Divine collaboration was not simply an eschewal of form or even an intentional sloppiness. It was an attempt to reorganize the experience of cinema so as to upset the distinctions that govern the making, distributing, and watching of films. The most popular explanations of Waters’s “trash aesthetics” have involved tracking down how these films appropriate the vernacular language of exploitation and cult films. At the same time, we know that underground cinema had a major influence on Waters, who was impressed by the films of the Kuchar brothers, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. He religiously read Film Culture and Jonas Mekas’s “movie journal” in the Village Voice. An early critical overview of Waters’s work by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum connects each of his early films to a particular work of the underground cinema. Roman Candles (1966) is Waters’s Chelsea Girls (1966); The Diane Linkletter Story (1970) is My Hustler (1965); Mondo Trasho (1969) equals Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963). Some historians propose that Waters’s work from this period displays a hybrid aesthetic that marries the generic features of the exploitation film with underground cinema (Stevenson). This hybridity thesis needs to be complicated. Waters was not the first underground filmmaker to turn to

164

KARL SCHOONOVER

trash cinema as a source of inspiration. Filmmakers like Anger, Warhol, and the Kuchars were already deeply mining these abjected film genres well before Waters. This fact suggests that a central quality of Waters’s trash aesthetic, its apparent discovery and recovery of low cinema, is never simply a refusal of Hollywood alone; it is also a response to a broader film culture deeply inflected by other practices of cinema. Furthermore, Hoberman and Rosenbaum see not only the underground’s influence on Waters’s work but also other key categories of cinema, including the historic avant-garde and art cinema, as influences on his directing: Pink Flamingos (1972) picks up the project of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929); Desperate Living (1977) goes beyond the excessive tendencies of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967). Hoberman and Rosenbaum encourage us to consider “trash aesthetics” not simply as a composite of earlier forms of cinema but as a dialectical practice that represents the dynamics and conflicts among various types of cinema within the diegesis of one film. At the very cusp of the seventies, Mondo Trasho provides a virtual catalogue of the key moments in underground film aesthetics. Waters mixes fifties and sixties pop songs to narrate images (and to amend punctuation and dialogue in places) in a way obviously indebted to Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), where music unveils the homoerotic unconscious of car culture, motorcycles, fascism, and neo-pagan religions. The influence of Smith’s Flaming Creatures can be felt not only in the artfag theatricality of Mondo Trasho’s costuming and makeup, but also in its camerawork, especially the framing and camera movement in the chaotic violently sexual sequences, as well as in the tonal qualities of its high-contrast images (low-speed film stock shot in bright natural light). Sequences in the Waters film echo the Kuchar brothers’ early films, mining the high-key glamour of the fifties heroines of B-grade sci-fi and melodrama. Warhol’s work, such as in Blow Job (1963), seems to guide this film’s use of sex acts as means of dilating temporality. Sex acts never stand for anything except the disruption of reproductive goals, an absolute perversion that is spectacularly banal and nearly un-erotic. Even Maya Deren’s ominous dreamscapes and abrupt cutting seem to haunt the images of this film. About thirty minutes into Mondo Trasho, Divine makes her debut appearance in cinema.3 From the start, her onscreen presence stands in direct tension with the idioms of underground cinema mentioned above. Her corporeality displaces a Jack Smith body, a Warhol body, even the wandering oneiric body of Deren’s work. Her violence flouts a Buñuelian indulgence of the indexical image as nonsensical symbol, with a surrealist close-up of cockroaches gorging themselves on Cinderella’s ground-meat handouts. Her body

DIVINE

165

introduces another corporeal and kinesthetic register that resists the comfort zones of figuration: metaphor, metonymy, and irony are unwelcome in her wake. Her body resists being defined by the fictional diegesis, displaying an assertive and unforgettable energy that exceeds the construction of fictional narrative space. Our sense that the film image can never quite contain Divine harks back to the larger-than-life and extratextual qualities of classical Hollywood stardom. She is always spilling over, in ways that might be mistaken as sloppy but that are integral to the film’s potency. These excesses extend the cinephile’s pleasures, such as those offered by Bela Lugosi’s tics in Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953) or the balletic kineticism of Chaplin’s slapstick. Divine’s gestures remind us that we are watching a star image, a presence that exists both because and in spite of her specific roles. Early on in her performance, we notice that her pants keep slipping down, causing her to tug them up at inopportune moments. This issue of fit is crucial to stardom, because a great star, even the uncanny Meryl Streep, is never fully engulfed by the characters she plays. A bit of her star image leaks out from behind the perfect accent or the bald wig. The performance must always allow the comparison between the character and the star to remain consciously intact in the mind of fans. Our delight in still seeing Bette Davis as we watch her performance as Queen Elizabeth in The Virgin Queen (1955) should not be confused with Brechtian distanciation. We take the duality of the star’s presence not as irony or duplicity. It rarely threatens verisimilitude in ways that would disrupt narrative pleasure. Edgar Morin describes this as stardom’s “dialectic of actor and role,” and he makes clear that the body and the process of embodiment is what maintains this “dialectic”: “The star is more than an actor incarnating characters, he incarnates himself in them, and they become incarnate in him” (emphasis original, 38). Warhol’s superstars rarely embody a similar dialectic. While it is true that his actors recur from film to film, the performance of character is never taken seriously enough to produce any tension in the embodiment. His superstars are always either just being or blatantly acting poorly (delivering flat dialogue or expectantly looking off camera for Paul Morrissey’s directorial prompts). By contrast, Divine displays an earnest passion, working to make her performance natural and effortless. She often shows off for us and even acknowledges our watching presence in her direct looks at the camera, but never offers any “wink, wink” self-reflexivity. Meanwhile, and paradoxically, her aspiration to embody a character is so impassioned at times that it exposes her inability to limit her image to just one role. This particular brand of excess is a star’s special domain, an abundance that exceeds the narrative world while never punching large enough holes in

166

KARL SCHOONOVER

the diegesis to disrupt the pleasures of fictional cohesion. This body spills over the image without revealing that image’s limits (its flatness, its framing), showing an overreaching energy that promises to live on forever but never betrays the image’s illusion of presence. In this sense, Divine’s star body offers a retort to the underground film body. In its iteration of other performance styles, this body introduces a cinematic physicality otherwise unavailable in underground cinema. Divine’s presence forecloses generic merger, exposing the fault lines between various kinds of cinema and questioning the overlap of their aesthetic tendencies. Divine’s star image also disallows art cinema’s cultivation of ambiguity and realism as much as her glamour reneges on the idioms of the underground. Her body does not bespeak the authorial presence associated with art cinema; she refuses to stand as a symptom of Waters’s inner neuroses. Never anything less than engrossing in every shot, Divine’s grotesquerie calls the bluff on Federico Fellini’s phallic women. Her “divinity” feels raw compared to the fabulous surfaces of 8 1/2 (1963) or the enchanting glitz of the dream-worlds in Juliet of the Spirits (1965). In Multiple Maniacs, Divine’s intrepid ecstasy antagonizes the neorealism of the film’s holy visitations, her voiceover and writhing corpulence contaminating the film’s reference to The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Marxist homoerotic refashioning of the New Testament. Her avid sex with Mink Stole’s character disabuses this perversion of any Pasolinian solemnity. Divine stands as a crucial interlocutor, dismissing while revealing the comfy cohabitation that already exists among opposing types of cinema: her forceful presence barges in on the underground and the art house. This uninvited guest interrupts the convention that sorts the aesthetic traditions of filmmaking into hierarchies, abruptly shifting the registers of the viewers’ experience and thus forcing them to reconsider how they are categorizing the film. It is important to remember here that García Espinosa’s manifesto deems art-house cinema a co-conspirator with Hollywood in pursuing perfection as a means of exclusion. The art film’s indulgence of the image, playful ambiguity, and promotion of the director’s persona does nothing to challenge Hollywood’s bracketing of cinematic form from politics. Divine’s stardom is imperfect because it refuses the formal qualities of the commodity—the acting based on verisimilitude and flawless beauty— without foreclosing on the radical potential of exhibitionism and presence offered by the cinematic image. Divine’s star image makes the ways that stardom typically allows star bodies to extend beyond the diegesis seem quaint and contrived.

DIVINE

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

167

The Problem of the Addressee

Near the end of Pink Flamingos, Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole, David Lochary) realize that the furniture in their upperclass home is rejecting them. Every time they try to sit down, the sofa or armchair kicks them out. The Marbles don’t realize until later that while they were out, Divine has cursed their upper-middle-class home by licking most of its surfaces and then having sex with her son on their sofa. The Marbles themselves have never lived a particularly pure life—they keep slaves in the basement—but in this film the Marbles do represent a certain upper-class attitude and sense of privilege. They wear fancy clothes, mistreat the servants in their employ, and adorn their walls with reproductions of Pop Art paintings and posters from sixties art films—Teorema (1968), Culde-Sac (1966), I, a Woman II (1968), and Night Games (1966)—and quasi-art films such as Boom! (1968) and Baby Doll (1956). Like the cursed furniture in Pink Flamingos, nearly every Waters film attacks what García Espinosa calls in another context “the ‘cultured’ elite audience” (“For an Imperfect Cinema,” 33) These films reproach not only conventional liberal middle-class affinities, but also question how specific media practices substantiate a middle-class consciousness through a particular mode of address. In their diegeses they condemn middle-class modes of vision (gazes of tolerance, curiosity, moral indignation, and ethnography), often torturing or violating middle-class voyeurs onscreen. Take, for example, the unsuspecting but eager suburbanites at the start of Multiple Maniacs (1970), who are easily lured into “The Cavalcade of Perversions,” a traveling freak show that promises to expose its audience to “loathsome displays:” “flagrant violations . . . [sites] that will make you sick . . . acts against nature and god.” While initially concerned that watching “Cavalcade” will make them late for lunch or other appointments in their life of leisure, once they begin watching the performance, none of the suburbanites seems anxious to leave. As Waters’s camera pans across this audience, we witness their flinches and shrieks of disgust. They never extricate themselves, gladly moving from attraction to attraction. Revulsion does not prevent them from accepting hamburgers from a vendor who travels through the crowd. While sometimes feigning to look away or cover their eyes, these suburbanites appear to delight in spectacles and condemnation. The “Cavalcade” itself seems designed for these tastes. The puke-eater and the kissing lesbians are billed as equally repugnant spectacles. The drug addict aims to elicit both repulsion and pity.

168

KARL SCHOONOVER

The Dashers (Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary), crazed owners of the beauty salon in Female Trouble, are similar to the suburbanites in Multiple Maniacs. They wish to consume spectacles for which they are never required to take responsibility; they want risqué views but risk-free viewing. The Dashers actively seek out sites of ugliness and depravity to enrapture themselves, as their constant “Ohs” and “Ahs” testify. As photographers, the film suggests, they aspire to a position just outside the sick reality captured in their images. The purpose of slumming, as the Dashers are doing, is to establish the foreignness of what one is experiencing, to assert one’s own status as tourist, and to establish that the “slums” are a world where one doesn’t belong and which is so remote that one bears no responsibility for it. Throughout the narrative the Marbles attempt to enact scenarios that allow for a pure voyeurism, a form of gazing that is assured in its mediation of the world. These characters represent a desire to renege on participation in the public world and an aversion to taking seriously, as interlocutors, the object of their gaze. Photography supplies a means of mediating the world, putting it under a microscope while keeping it at arm’s length. The liberal middle class is, however, not only an enemy of these films. It is also their intended audience. Waters readily admits that a class of viewers similar to himself is the one most likely to come to his films: “I was always trying to find what the liberals held dear to their heart and make fun of it . . . [such as] glorified violence [which] was the one no-no of hippies. [I did this] because that’s who came to my movies: liberals. So that’s the one [way] you had to get their goat” (“Incredibly Strange Film Show with Jonathan Ross: John Waters Episode,” Channel 4 Television Corporation, 1988). Divine’s body, star image, and performance are essential weapons in this arsenal. Divine fandom operates in a manner quite different from the self-assured mastery and aloofness so often associated with the cult film viewer. This punishing diva’s caustic humor, such as the glamour fits already mentioned, condemns the very spectators that are its audience. For all the sadistic pleasures she enacts by proxy, she also reminds her viewers of their masochistic desires. She addresses an audience excited to have the moral and ethical assumptions of their viewing practice mocked and vilified. If these films are a reform school for spectators, then Divine is that school’s brutal disciplinary headmistress. Divine’s films from the seventies are preoccupied with the idea of aesthetics as a means of political and social power. Their plots center around characters striving be seen and who believe that agency originates in outward appearance. Fashion, performance, and public display are the sites of

DIVINE

169

The political efficacy of exhibitionism: Divine’s strut in Pink Flamingos (John Waters, Dreamland/Saliva Films, 1972). Courtesy of Photofest.

narrative struggle. Formally, the films are obsessed with surface, costume, and display. Divine stands as the exemplar of this impulse, and the narrative structure feels at times loosened by these films’ indulgence of scenarios that most amplify Divine’s “to-be-looked-at-ness.” This “to-be-looked-atness” endows Divine’s characters with an impossible utopian agency: an ability to occupy public space on her own terms. In these films, testing the boundaries of good taste was always explored alongside the political efficacy of exhibitionism. García Espinosa connects stardom and exhibitionism in his discussion of how “the imperfect cinema rejects exhibitionism.” He defines exhibitionism in two ways: cinema is exhibitionist because it aims to get “shown in established theatres and circuits”; and cinema is exhibitionist because it offers a spotlight to those who wish to be in the spotlight, to occupy the center of attention (“For an Imperfect Cinema,” 32). His discussion suggestively alludes to stardom in ways that are not fully elaborated, but it implies that the liberation of the film actor from a diva impulse will release cinema from a kind of commercialism, showmanship, and over-emphasis of the individual. In many respects García Espinosa’s neorealist rejection of the star system reveals the incommensurability of his project with Divine’s overt embodiment of stardom. However, Divine’s image, as we have seen, similarly depends upon a rejection of other brands of stardom. Her showmanship offers a persistent retort to the boundaries that distribution and exhibition circuits maintain between commercial and noncommercial cinema.

170

KARL SCHOONOVER

Furthermore, Divine’s stardom flaunts an unchecked and imperfect form of exhibitionism. Her ability to attract attention to herself, to hog the screen, or to upstage lesser actors makes for an interesting dialogue with the narratives of these films, one that associates making a public spectacle with acts of terrorism. Divine’s exhibitionism always runs a surplus. It is irreconcilable to commercial interests, remaining outside systematized forms of display and stardom. So while reactionary cinema for García Espinosa is contaminated by exhibitionist impulses, Divine’s imperfect stardom exploits exhibitionism in order to comment on the problem of the addressee. This appropriation of exhibitionism allows her image to make filmgoing audiences uncomfortable with their own subjective limits. In this way, it makes her stardom politically relevant and also queer, because this image formally intervenes in the contemporary politics around occupying public space and the political rhetoric of going public. Take, for example, Female Trouble and its absurdist imagining of aesthetic insurgency. The film depicts a beauty underworld where strategies of self-improvement, physical embellishment, and the guerrilla politics of the seventies collide: catastrophic makeovers, retaliatory facial scarring, intravenous injections of mascara as though it were heroin, fanatical lipstick addictions, and terrorist fashion shoots. Diegetically, exhibitionist tactics seem to offer agency to all: achieving a striking appearance will lead to power. The Dashers reverse the dominant ideas of beauty to attract attention, and with moves that could be read as anarchic actions typical of the late sixties and early seventies force the standards of decency beyond limits of the status quo. In the end, however, the film does not align itself with the Dashers, and the narration might be seen to resist a simple inversion of binary terms such as is evident in the contrast between appropriateness and inappropriateness. The narration attempts a more ambitious intervention in the terms of taste, working subtly to reorient the viewer’s engagement with aesthetics. By the end of the film, aesthetics clearly remains in the hands of the political and social elite. Beauty constitutes a form of hegemony in the onscreen world. Power, in fact, resides not with those who can beautify themselves, but rather with those whose definition of beauty conforms to the dominant ideologies of appearance and public display. The film attempts to effect a shift in the viewer towards the aesthetics and standards of beauty. Divine’s star image is a fulcrum upon which to compare our consumption of her image with that of onscreen audiences. The documentary-style sequences that follow Divine as she walks through Baltimore’s busy streets are crucial to the spectator’s engagement shifting from camp distancing to adoring an imperfect star. Dressed in a

DIVINE

171

tight, sequined animal-print cat suit with an asymmetrical neckline, Divine takes a fiercely exuberant walk down the city’s busy streets, attracting the attention of passersby. She slinks across the screen in a sped-up saunter, stopping every few steps to pose like a fashion model on a high-fashion shoot. Similar sequences of Divine publicly strutting her stuff appear in nearly all of her films with Waters, and they offer some of the most vital moments of their collaboration. In Pink Flamingos, the sequence appears shot from inside a moving car. Divine appears aware of the camera (often confronting our gaze, posing in a wildly exhibitionist fashion for us, or nodding to us), but the shooting scenario hides the camera from others on the street. Divine attracts a good deal of attention from those around her, and we are torn between watching her and watching the onlookers. The audiences for Divine’s public struts are thus distinct from the groups of untrained actors that otherwise populate Waters’s mise-en-scène. These audiences are incidental and contingent to the streets of Baltimore; they are neither collected nor choreographed,4 and are composed of what Dziga Vertov would call people “caught unawares,” subjects whom we are not sure even know that they are being filmed. Thus the profilmic reality grants these sequences a potency and sense of danger that is emblematic of Waters’s work in the seventies. Divine’s stardom pulsates here, thanks not only to the exhilaration of the real risks involved with her going public, but also to the presence of unprepared bystanders who react to her in real time. These sequences document the allure of Divine, but they also point to her unrelenting commitment to occupying public space. García Espinosa’s account implies that art cinema supplies fodder for the liberal humanism of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia, an educated, upper-middle-class viewership that enjoys art, making conventions such as camp that play with the collapsing of cultural distances but that never threaten the integrity of the political and social structures of privilege. Divine’s imperfect exhibitionism effectively collapses that safe distance, divulging the ultimately divisive impulse that subtends camp. Moreover, it exposes the concordance of camp to other central features of a seventies liberal mindset: “slumming” and tolerance. Divine’s struts and glamour fits could be read as continual reminders that tolerance is never absolute. Gradations of tolerance may exist, but even in its most liberal manifestation, tolerance still lends sovereignty to the status quo, which may be why sympathy-based charity so often shadows tolerance. Tolerance and charity are affects that extract as much privilege as they give away. They concretize the subject as a patron and the object as a needy recipient. As much as tolerance (or “slumming”) expands the subject’s openness to outsiders, it reifies

172

KARL SCHOONOVER

the boundaries of exclusion. It apologizes through compensatory gestures that are always disingenuous in their commitments to sincere change. By contrast, Divine’s imperfect stardom disallows self-congratulatory liberal sensitivity. Her star image displays how seventies liberalism used gestures of tolerance to foreclose on the public identities of queers, restricting how queers are permitted to occupy public space.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Waste Economics

Underground cinema shares with art-house cinema of the sixties and seventies an aesthetic overindulgence that feels decadent or wasteful. Both types of film have been known to wallow in their images, indulging a visual density or over-adornment of their mise-en-scène. At many moments, Pink Flamingos can be seen similarly to revel in the pure spectacle of its images, such as in the sequence in which Divine’s trailer is burned. Waters now winces as he looks back at this sequence: “It goes on too long” (Pink Flamingos DVD commentary). According to him, many of the aesthetic excesses in his early films simply reflect a lack of training, a dependence upon sub-industrial materials, and an absence of large-scale financial backing. Long takes were more about necessity than aesthetics, he admits, because with only one camera, limited film stock, cramped shooting scenarios, and limited time, reshooting a scene for coverage or cutaways was rarely possible. Waters acknowledges that audiences saw extended long takes as arty. “For young people at the time, there was a radical appeal to watching slow films,” he recalls. This predilection may have helped to popularize his makeshift productions. Audiences understood dead time or nonnarrative sequences as a purposeful exploration of real time or duration. Unlike most art films and underground cinema, however, these “unintentional” excesses (for Waters, technical lacks) are in dialogue with a thematic emphasis on trash in the films (a fact Waters now forgets), and for many audiences, this dialogue may have provided its own distinct brand of pleasure and catharsis. The trash of “trash aesthetics” therefore carries two overt meanings. On one hand, it is a catchall phrase that Waters and his critics use to describe an image which is both purposefully tawdry and intentionally over the top. In this sense of “trash,” the image aspires to the outrageousness of exploitation cinema—bottom-feeder films made with meager resources that are nevertheless famous and pleasurable for their gratuitous surpluses. On the other hand, “trash” describes how Waters’s films meditate on trash, building narratives around what it means to live both in and as waste. In fact,

DIVINE

173

these films seem drawn to “making something” of refuse, excrement, bodily excretions, and garbage. As the muse of Waters’s “trash aesthetics” and perhaps the first person to eat shit on film, Divine is easily mistaken for a figure of inversion or appropriation. But “trash aesthetics” presents a politics of waste quite distinct from modernist forays into trash: this is neither the Dada reclamation of nonsense and noise, nor Surrealism’s heretical inversions of conscious and subconscious, nor Duchamp’s repurposing of the everyday object as high art. García Espinosa relates camp humor to waste management. Camp operates, he tells us, by appropriating unwanted surplus and discovering pleasure in repurposing it. He states: “‘Camp’ and its attitude toward everything outdated is an attempt to rescue these leftovers and to lessen the distance between high culture and people” (“For an Imperfect Cinema,” 30). García Espinosa then contrasts camp’s virtual and insincere leveling of culture with the intervention offered by an imperfect aesthetics. Camp’s inversions are enjoyed by some and not others, and thus cannot transform the hierarchies and divisions of the current moment. As we’ve seen, however, “trash aesthetics” are more complex than any simple camp reclamation, and Divine’s star image acquires a deeper political resonance when put in the context of seventies film culture and politics. Divine’s stardom puts the structures of waste management on full display; her filthy presence often constitutes a meditation on who and what ends up as trash and how. Her performances ask: How do we know which waste is trash? What are the consequences of accepting the hegemonic definitions of detritus? Is there anything essential or authentic in late capitalism’s separation of those who can waste from those who “lack”? In a 1985 clarification of his original essay, García Espinosa explains that he proposed “imperfect cinema” as a means not only to confront “the question of quality” and “the problem of the addressee” but also to demand that art address “the culture of waste” that results from “developed capitalism.” In what follows, I first examine how Divine’s “excesses” contaminate late capitalism’s differentiation of productivity and waste. Then, in the next section, I expand this line of thinking, to argue that this imperfect star image addresses head-on the presumed wastefulness of nonreproductive sexuality.5

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Putrid Divine

Looking back, the seventies seems to be the first period in which most Americans confronted the paradox of late-capitalism: How is it that when production comes more easily than ever before, there seems to

174

KARL SCHOONOVER

be so much lack in the world and so much waste at the same time? Gas shortages, epidemic hunger, blackouts, and other crises made the symmetry between overproduction and underdevelopment unavoidably visible. Over the course of the twentieth century, the innovations in plastics, chemicals, and nuclear power had promised universal access to resources. Ironically, these inventions produced trash that would never go away, as the ecological disasters of Love Canal and Three Mile Island announced over the course of the decade. The exemplars of new-era plentitude were now the harbingers of eternal waste, of a new kind of trash that refused to disappear. Trash would stubbornly occupy our lives and outlive us. In the meantime, it would leach out, always contaminating, radiating, and spilling over and into our world. The seeds of prosperity had grown into overproduction and overdevelopment, and living alongside uncontainable and irresolvable waste suddenly seemed much more closely tied to conditions of scarcity and underdevelopment. Trash represented a new perspective on human history, one in which civilization was not only something humans hurried to preserve, maintain, and protect, but also something humans had to live with. We learned that we would suffer in the shadow of the everincreasing trash that our civilizing missions had produced. With the failure of renewable energy initiatives, the oil crisis of 1973, the return from Vietnam of veterans with Agent Orange–related conditions, and the increasing awareness of many endangered species, ecology emerged as the branch of science most able to address these concerns. Meanwhile, surpluses of human energy appeared to teem all around us: youth-quakes, protesting populations, cults exploding with violence, serial-killing gangs, or throngs of disco dancers publicly affirming their nonreproductive sexuality thanks to gay liberation or the Pill. Urban infrastructure, public works, police, and the welfare system, seen as suddenly unable to control the flow of natural and human resources, were blamed for blackouts, shortages, and general civil unrest. Anyone raised in seventies America remembers a childhood littered with not only plastic toys from Barbie dolls to Slinkys, Styrofoam, and shrink-wrapped vegetables but also gestures designed to compensate for wastefulness: trash compactors, conservation-reminder labels on light switches, antilittering campaigns, the Zero Population Growth movement, and the transition from pull-tabs to stay tabs on soda cans. Much earlier in the century, Walter Benjamin argued that the phenomenon of stardom betrayed the excesses of consumer culture. For him, the movie star always reeks of capitalism’s fetid value system. He writes, “Film responds to the shriveling of the aura by artificially building up the ’personality’ outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the

DIVINE

175

money of the film industry, preserves that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character” (261). Stardom aims to produce an excess that will compensate for the artwork’s lack; stardom is the reminder of what has withered away. What if the putrescence of the star began to smell? What exactly would it smell like? Divine’s imperfect stardom alerts us to the star image’s rotten and compensatory character. In fact, we might say that her star image derives from a Benjaminian understanding of stardom as a byproduct of late capitalism and its social divisions. The beautiful and the putrid are often interchangeable or coterminous in Waters’s descriptions of his muse: Divine was at once “the most beautiful woman in the world” and the “filthiest.” We might categorize Divine’s look, the outward manifestation of imperfect stardom, as a vile glamour, because her star image appropriates specifically cinematic means of beautification (a beauty only possible via the cinematic image) and redeploys them to vulgar ends. In doing this, her performance of stardom rehearses the putrification of culture by the commodity system. Pink Flamingos is the Divine film that most directly addresses the putrid character of celebrity. According to this film, stardom is the fusion of fame and filth. The characters in this film believe that to achieve celebrity they must prove themselves the filthiest people in world. What exactly “filth” means is complicated in this film. The film borrows from mental hygiene’s discourse of deviance to delight in the unclean, sick, and twisted behavior of its main characters. These same characters seem to sustain themselves in an environment of squalor and detritus. The film also draws on the idea of perversion as “lacking sexual hygiene” and the word’s association with indecency, pornography, or smut. By its end, the film suggests that Divine and the Marbles represent different kinds of filthiness, each with a distinct moral compass. On one hand, the Marbles’ filthiness appears to be complicit with over-consumption’s production of waste, as represented in not only their big house, tasteful furniture, liberal tolerance, and fetishism but also their brutal commodification of fertility, their extraction of money from couples who wish to raise children but whose biology excludes them from reproduction, and their abuse of workers. On the other hand, Divine’s filth is as erratically sublime— almost utopian—and as joyous as it is violent. These differences notwithstanding, at a base level the film suggests that garnering celebrity involves trafficking in trash. Achieving stardom is counterproductive for a civil society. The star image emerges from “yellow journalism.” It is a trash trade that reveals how celebrity rarely produces any material while giving itself over to being consumed. Yet this crudely Marxist critique of stardom as

176

KARL SCHOONOVER

non-productive, as superstructural, as symptomatic, and as a reflection of the labor base is undone by the star body of Divine herself. Divine’s actual performance in the film reworks this logic. In fact, the notoriety of the film’s most infamous scene, in which Divine eats dog feces, suggests that stardom originates at the end point of production. Stardom is a process characterized by scavenging. The crucial feature of this stunt is the length and integrity of a single shot, what Gaylyn Studlar calls a “notorious example of Bazinian spatio-temporal integrity” (6). In a long take, we watch the dog defecate and Divine bring the feces to her mouth, chew, swallow, and smile. This is the ultimate act of a star’s devotion to her fans, but it also lays bare the movie star as a symbol, par excellence, of capitalism’s dependence upon excess—a “body” that accrues value purely through an exchange and circulation that produces no material goods. No matter the power of this icon, she remains a byproduct of a larger production system. The star’s work is to produce excess value: beyond the text, the real, the newsworthy, the useful, or quotidian necessity.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

The Aesthetics of Excess and Sexual Politics

The world of Pink Flamingos deems both sex perversion and stardom filthy. The pervert and the star may not always speak in the same language, but their voices are both always heard as excess by others. The politics of Waters’s seventies films has always been a sticky matter. Two prominent readings of Divine suggest that the politics of her star image comes from its overlap of perversion and excess. Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick are more suggestive than conclusive in their compelling study, “Divinity,” when they state: Waters has been the filmmaker who most insistently offers erotic, problematizing images, and performs fore-grounded acts, of otherwise taken-for-granted economic processes of consumption, absorption, and waste. . . . Waters’s project does not involve any simple, merely paradoxical reassigning of equations between filth and value, although there are moments of his work that could be taken in isolation as doing so. Rather, through a series of metonymies around the body of Divine, he explores one materialized displacement after another: food as clothing, clothing as bodies, bodies as food, bodies as waste, waste as food—and only in these contexts, waste as value. (310)

Studlar reads Divine as a dangerous sign of patriarchal misogyny (Studlar). Divine’s body does not simply unleash the threat of the feminine; her excesses and perversions counteract and/or compensate for the threat of lack that the female body usually induces in the male spectator. Studlar

DIVINE

177

Excess, waste, perversion: Divine receives the gift of a pig’s head in Pink Flamingos. Courtesy of Photofest.

seems aware that for psychoanalysis, nearly all sexual desire diverts its subject from procreative aims. The radicality of Freud’s account of perversion is that it deemed all desire excessive to the reproduction of the species. By ignoring how the desire generated by the star image of Doris Day is just as perverse and excessive as that produced by the star image of Divine, however, Studlar inadvertently reaffirms the marginality of queer sexuality by associating Divine with excess. The idea of perversion as waste persists in late capitalism’s hierarchies of socio-sexual identities as a way of maintaining the procreative certainty of heterosexual desire. Perhaps the horror of gay sex (for some) comes from its unveiling of desire as purposeless. Superstructural, inessential, wasted, excessive in its ontology, gay desire is always burdened with the question, can non-hetero sex produce anything? Does gay sex ever offer more than simply waste on top of waste? Gays are always already extras, add-ons, and sidekicks. In fact, homosexuality’s stigmata reflect how this useless surplus takes up public space: the gays are “over the top,” loud, lisping, flamboyant, hysterical, gossiping. Limp wrists aren’t good for much more than display. The Waters/Divine collaboration had little time for either finger pointing at bad depictions of queers or championing gays through good depictions. In fact, Divine’s star body rebukes the idea that “positive images” will release queer people from answering the nearly impossible demands placed

178

KARL SCHOONOVER

upon them. Her image refuses the impossible task of quantifying what queer desire contributes to the world. She also rebukes the compensatory gestures of a liberal culture bent on either concealing or refashioning, in a more palatable form, the surpluses that the homosexual body represents— a form that names the antihuman value system of modernity only in the sotto voce of the open secret. The “aesthetics of trash” aims to make impossible this repurposing of homosexual excess. Pink Flamingos provokes the issue of queer productivity for Jack Smith, who in his review of the film aggressively posits this question to his reader: “[T]he world needs its queers—who else would upholster your black velvet urinal flaps on your mausoleum theater seats?” (199). I have argued that Divine’s star image exposes how the economic “logic” of the cinema industry reinforces the wider culture’s presumptions about value and how that culture trains us to take for granted the inherent superiority of products made by large-scale industry. In purely economic terms, her imperfection taunts precisely that which the commodity system uses to disguise our limited access to the means of production and to the reproduction of the means of production. An imperfect stardom refuses to abide by the protocols of a single star system, and in doing so it reveals how politics are embedded in the industrial topography of cinema consumption. In this sense, then, “trash aesthetics” does not simply push the limits of decency; it also articulates how matters of taste delimit the politics of social space. By exploring tastelessness in narrative acts of public display, these films address how quality—that is, “perfection”—conspires to reify the viewing practices of cinema audiences so as to serve the priorities of capitalist culture, leading to a regressive and reactionary ethics of vision. Taste, these films tell us, is the battleground upon which a new politics of representation could be fought for and won. Divine’s imperfect stardom demonstrates how stardom impacts the politics of public space: how it naturalizes who gets to be public and the uneven distribution of public power. For this reason, her stardom is a powerful retort to the sexual politics of the seventies. It is helpful to remember, here, that the way a film depicted sex often determined its categorization. In the seventies, these generic boundaries were up for grabs. In fact, depictions of sex, sexual identity, and desire are crucial sites from which to map the shifting spheres of cinema, because over the course of the seventies the kinds of films depicting queerness changed dramatically. Common liberal-minded progress narratives would suggest that this represents a gradual emancipation of representation. Since the late sixties, these accounts would suggest, there has been increased tolerance and acceptance of non-normative people on the screen.

DIVINE

179

In the United States, art cinema had always been synonymous with representing the body in unexpected ways (Neale). Art films had often offered the only cinema to explore the terrain of the foreign, the adventurous, the unexpected, the unexpurgated, and the corporeally revealing image. By the seventies, a narrative emphasis on sexual perversion was nearly a prerequisite of art cinema. European art films so regularly troped queer sex (most often as a politically decadent aberration, a symptom of fascism) that it had become a cliché of the art-house experience. The nonnormative sex act features prominently in the most popular art films of this period, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and Last Tango in Paris (1972), and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). Meanwhile, Hollywood’s climate around sex shifted dramatically in this same period. The loosening grips of censorship authorities and religious advocacy groups allowed for an unprecedented exploration of gay sex in mainstream films. Hollywood found mischievous delight in allowing identities that were once limned by innuendo, or gay sidekicks, to take over the mise-en-scène of mainstream films. Divine’s physicality is, in fact, born during this moment when the shifting politics of cinema aesthetics and consumption often finds expression in a perverting of bodies. Her persona is defined against the problematic exceptionalism that still plagued queer desire in both the art-house and the mainstream films, her star image refuting these givens of representing queer identity. In fact, her body discloses the compromises involved in making queerness cinematically representable. The homos of the art-house, the underground, and Hollywood, Divine reminds us, have little to offer toward the liberation of perverts. Cinema’s liberal representations of “good” queers made little impact on the public politics of queer identity, instead offering a virtual scenario in which liberals might proudly and temporarily exercise their charitable tolerance. Moreover, Divine’s star image does not just challenge the orthodoxies of seventies film content; it also refuses concurrent socio-industrial categories that delimited film exhibition and viewer experience. In this way, her stardom makes evident the impact that traditional and more modern categorizations of cinema had upon the public politics of queer sex. ■

■

■

History has betrayed Divine. The afterlife of camp aesthetics has not been kind to her legacy. The self-conscious irony that pervades television, digital media, and mainstream film clouds our ability to see the critical tensions lurking in her seventies performances. If camp was ever associated with a

180

KARL SCHOONOVER

fringe perspective, it is hard to remember that this was so. Its attitude has been thoroughly adopted by mainstream programming: “The Simpsons,” “The Soup,” and reality shows on the Bravo network. In this context, is it possible to see Divine’s star body without refracting it through the lens of history since her death in 1988? Can we see this star body without our vision being occluded by commercial culture’s infatuation with camp, irony, and trash? The obvious answer to these questions is no. While our moment is not the first to see the culture industry co-opt avant-garde tactics, many observers question whether “trash aesthetics” can be distinguished from the impulses of commercial productions. We might easily look at the current proliferation of camp irony as evidence that the Divine/Waters project failed to reorganize culture in any substantial way. From this view, the selfironizing tenor of mainstream Hollywood products (cringe comedies or items such as Scary Movie [2000] or Grindhouse [2007]) points to the limits of Divine and Waters’s original “trash aesthetics”; and the success on Broadway and in the West End of Hairspray dulls the power of their original work. Perhaps Divine’s attention-grabbing stunts were aimed at achieving mainstream stardom more than radical queer protest, as her former manager and biographer, Bernard Jay, suggests (3). In the long run, of course, unfettered access to the past is not possible. But it is also crucial that we not read Divine’s stardom only in terms of our current media culture’s assumptions about camp, irony, parody, and sex. These films gain political relevance to the extent that we depart from thinking of them in terms of kitsch appropriation and camp leveling. Situating the formal features of these films within a seventies frame forces us to appreciate them as aesthetic attempts to think of cinema as an economic and political practice. As her “glamour fits” make clear, Divine most often attacks the perfect star image on three fronts at once. Even the causal consumer of her star image knows this: her performances are never simply just ugly, just “in our face,” or just gross. Her “glamour fits” were her trademark, her emblematic “business,” and, like Chaplin’s walk or Bette Davis’s use of cigarette-smoking to punctuate her dialogue, this business always expressed more than just a characteristic gesture or trademark tic. It offered a form of commentary that used the body and the voice as forms of rhetoric. I began with the suggestion that the “glamour fits” epitomize Divine’s imperfect stardom. Looking back at her fits now, we can specify this claim a bit more. These fits expose how dominant economic systems (the star system being one of them) confuse the issue of quality with those of address and value. The “perfect” star holds a beauty that both speaks to us and is

DIVINE

181

beyond compare. This perfection masks the system behind all mainstream stars: the elaborate beautification, the scientific marketing to audiences, and the establishment of re-circulatable value necessary to all stars’ success. The “glamour fits” also seem to assail the safe distances associated with camp spectatorship. By evading the distinctions between surface appearance and deeper meaning, parody and irony are forestalled. In this way, the “glamour fits” are consistent with García Espinosa’s injunction to devise an approach to cinema that does not further reify the divisions of beauty and ugliness, wealth and waste, art and the people. N OT E S 1. As García Espinosa writes, “To show a process is not exactly equivalent to analyzing it. To analyze, in the traditional sense of the word, always implies a closed prior judgment. To analyze a problem is to show the problem (not the process) permeated with judgments which the analysis itself generates a priori. To analyze is to block off from the outset any possibility for analysis on the part of the interlocutor. . . . To show the process of a problem, on the other hand, is to submit it to judgment without pronouncing the verdict. To show the process of a problem is like showing the very development of the news item, without commentary; it is like showing the multifaced evolution of a piece of information without evaluating it” (32). 2. I recognize that comparing the Waters/Divine collaboration to the aspirations of a Third Cinema manifesto is unorthodox. However, I am not suggesting that radical Latin American films or postcolonial African films occupied the same place in film culture as those made by Waters and Divine. Rather, I am proposing to take García Espinosa’s work and other Third Cinema manifestos as indispensable theories of cinema per se. 3. Harris Glen Milstead appeared in three earlier Waters films, in each case as a woman: Jacqueline Kennedy in Eat Your Makeup (1968) and The Smoking Nun in Roman Candles (1966). However, the persona of Divine first appears in this film. Note that the Internet Movie Database uses “Divine” as the heading for its entry that lists all of the roles played by the person born Harris Glen Milstead. 4. In Female Trouble, Divine’s strutting and posing occurs mostly in front of apparently real citizens of Baltimore. The film amends this audience with a single cutaway reaction shot to one actor whose glass eye pops out when he sees Divine. 5. My thinking here is indebted to Moon and Sedgwick’s work on Divine, which suggests how her stardom embodies the modern paradox of waste/lack.

9 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave Performance and the Politics of Singularity NICK DAVIS

As candidates for critical evaluation, Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave constitute both an apropos and an unexpected pair. The mid-sixties crest of the British New Wave swept them both into stardom on both sides of the Atlantic, but nowhere onscreen have their paths intersected. Both actresses share a long history of allegiances to leftist and radical causes, and both have worked somewhat sporadically over the course of their spectacularly durable careers. It seems clearer in Redgrave’s case that 182

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

183

the first circumstance has led directly to the second; nevertheless she has appeared in almost twice as many films as Christie during the same forty years, even while keeping one foot planted in the legitimate theater, where Christie has demonstrated almost no aspiration to work on the stage. In the context of this volume, both actresses invite but also unsettle the rubric of “Movie Stars of the Seventies” for reasons related, however disparately, to their political as well as their artistic energies. At the simplest level, the seventies was not a period of remarkable productivity for these performers, both of whom slowed the pace of their film work to almost half of what it had been in their breakout years of the previous decade. Unlike Jane Fonda, who largely retreated from liberal soap-boxing in the eighties and from acting in the nineties, and unlike Glenda Jackson, who established a full-time vocation in electoral politics only by renouncing artistic labor, Christie and Redgrave survive (and inspire) as two touchstone figures from an era of aesthetically adventurous and ideologically attentive popular cinema who have never relinquished their investments in art or in politics. Still, to inquire into the histories and personae of Christie and Redgrave is to disturb, rethink, and hopefully expand the notion of the “political actress,” a phrase that names neither a self-evident nor an oxymoronic position. In the narrowest sense, the investigator discovers that Christie’s and Redgrave’s lives both on and off the movie screen defy as often as they corroborate several mainstays of their popular legacies. For example, Christie’s career is often recounted as though she works much less than she actually does. Her perceived cycles of reclusion and reemergence correspond to and perhaps even derive from the evolving, ambiguous relations to “real-world” political struggles that Christie and her characters have evinced over time. Her notoriety as a great beauty has the frequent effect of eclipsing her political probity and agency, and her opting for radical campaigns over glamorous self-commodification has sometimes been misperceived, when it has been acknowledged at all, as an outright forfeiture of career and public life. On the other hand, her stalwart choices in the eighties, especially, to collaborate almost exclusively with feminist, experimental, or counter-hegemonic filmmakers and activists may imply a clearer, less idiosyncratic relation to politics than Christie and her image have in fact sustained. Redgrave, largely due to one notorious phrase (“Zionist hoodlums”), holds so much more renown than Christie does as a public-sphere agitator that we are prone to making opposite errors in judgment: reducing her diverse social-justice campaigns to single issues or monolithic stances; assuming that her professional life has been more frequently or legibly beholden to her ideological convictions than is actually the case; and classifying

184

NICK DAVIS

her as an isolated or fringe figure when, to a surprising degree, many of Redgrave’s film roles starting in the late seventies raise the hopeful possibility of coalition and camaraderie, particularly among women, as sites for political awakening and action. Both actresses embody but also question the workings of metonymy, of who or what “stands” for whom or for what in the ideological as well as the mimetic senses of “representation”—particularly since their films often etherealize and compartmentalize their images, such that they “stand for” ideas that elude easy comprehension, in subversive as well as more mainstream projects. Both women, formerly iconic of sixties youth culture, proceeded in and after the seventies to labor in films dedicated to complicating iconicity and critiquing versions of history. For that reason, close study of their images helps to reveal how popular film can construct meaning and emit political resonance through mechanisms other than direct narrative content or such ideologically loaded forms as Brechtian alienation or Eisensteinian dialectic. Specifically, through miming Deleuzian concepts like singularity, the time-image, and the becomingwoman, the images of Christie and Redgrave, traced across their careers, evoke nascent and fragile permeabilities between the individual and the ideological. Through their styles of artistry, their bodies of work, and the formal contexts of their films, both women figure “identity” and even “politics” in unusual ways—that is, through a series of diffuse relations, contradictions, extratextual echoes, and molecular contingencies, rather than speaking principally to such overt political frameworks as war, bureaucracy, governance, and protest.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Julie Christie: No Woman Inside

John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) made Julie Christie a transatlantic star and earned her an Academy Award, providing the emblematic figure for her early career. Ironically, though, filmmaking frequently destabilizes this very iconicity, indivisibly Christie’s own and that of her character, the swinging sexpot and melancholic princess Diana Scott. Prototypical in this respect is a rack-focus shot late in the film in which Christie’s pristine, mournful close-up in the right half of the widescreen frame gradually blurs, while the dim background simultaneously resolves itself into a spread of fifteen photographs of her, hung side by side on her own wall. Crucially, the juxtaposition of Christie-as-Diana to this mosaic of her likenesses does not mark her “actual” close-up or indeed the “actual” Diana as fundamentally more “real” than the snapshots. Diana’s subsequent decisions and her persistent beholdenness to the popular media in its various forms—including

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

185

the serialized magazine memoir through which she narrates her story—sustain Darling’s relentless theorem that Diana is indistinguishably “actual” and “virtual” at all times. This sense of Christie’s diaphanous ontology, laying key groundwork for what becomes of her image in the seventies, accrued greater complexity in such sixties projects as Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Petulia (1968), in which Pauline Kael described her with fascinated frustration as “expressive and empty, brilliantly faceted but with something central missing, almost as if there’s no woman inside” (For Keeps 222). The cyclical structures of Darling and the insistent trendiness of the film, in style and as theme, have haunted the rest of Christie’s career, constructing her not just as a fashion icon (accepting her Oscar in gold pajamas, presenting one the following year in the telecast’s first-ever miniskirt) but as a fashion unto herself: a visual enticement of uncertain nutritional value, subject to inevitable dissolves and ballyhooed revivals. Christie’s later entrée into political engagement coincides with the tendency of mass media to herald virtually all of her future film performances as “comebacks,” even when she had performed to acclaim in films as recently as the previous year. A 2008 profile in the Daily Telegraph proves illustrative in this regard. “But really,” testifies author David Jenkins, a longtime friend of Christie’s, “it’s been politics, campaigning, and the eschewal of glamour that’s absorbed her since leaving Hollywood in 1978 or so” (“Julie Christie: Still Our Darling,” 2 March 2008). Note that political engagement qualifies here, far from anomalously, as an antonym or at least a move away from acting and “glamour,” themselves firmly conjoined to the “Hollywood” signifier. In the very next sentence, the article passes from informing the presumably ignorant reader of Christie’s late-seventies political epiphanies to asking Christie whether she herself is, in fact, mistaken about the time-plot she ascribes to her own maturation. “Had not Shampoo been a political film?” the author asks, in a free-indirect mode that confronts the reader, the actress, and perhaps Jenkins’s own critical conscience with this interrogative parry. “Had she been political in 1968 and in the 1970s heyday of the radical counter-culture?” (Jenkins). Christie demurs, but what interests me about this highly symptomatic profile are, first, how Christie’s politics are presumed to be that which must be explained and resuscitated as common knowledge, in striking contrast to the seeming self-evidence of her fame and beauty; second, how “politics” and “campaigning” denote that abyss of absence, of artistic or cultural exile, from which Christie must serially repatriate herself; and third, the disagreement between the interviewer and the actress about when and how “politics” suffused her personal and artistic legacy, implying a larger disagreement about what “politics” might mean,

186

NICK DAVIS

how actions might be ratified or recognized as “politics,” and who does the ratifying. Christie’s enigmatic career supports both Jenkins’s conviction about the “political” character of her seventies films and her own denial of that claim: a paradox that recalls the visual juggling of multiple Christies, hard to perceive simultaneously, in Darling. Appropriately, this discursive impasse arises with reference to Shampoo (1975) and to the decade of work that often recedes whenever anyone associates Christie too strictly with the “swinging” sixties or with her “subversive” persona in the eighties. The buried secret of Christie’s seventies films, the so-called “Hollywood” period, is that they do coherently connect the early with the later films, albeit not in a way that feels like an extractable through-line, or a persistent affinity with one ideological position. If Christie finally becomes visible as a “political” actress late in the seventies—wearing fatigues to give press conferences with militant animal-rights groups, headlining rallies for the eradication of nuclear arms and nuclear power, serving on a shadow board scrutinizing the investments of Barclay’s Bank in the South African apartheid regime, and providing unsuspecting interviewers with copies of fact files about American Cruise missile deployments (Callan 176)—it is not without having laid some subtle aesthetic ground for this evolution in preceding years. Nor is it by making the kinds of didactic films like Norma Rae (1979), The China Syndrome (1979), Silkwood (1983), Country (1984) and Marie (1985) that actresses of the late seventies and early eighties had enviable opportunities to make, many of them echoing that post-Nixon tide of male paranoiac thrillers that typically fall within contemporary accounts of “politicized” American cinema from that era. The activation of Christie’s image in the seventies as a “social hieroglyph wherein the spatial and temporal parameters of contemporary collective life can be read” (Rodowick x) followed neither this contour nor those of the theoretical, subaltern, and protest cinemas to which her later affiliations would repeatedly draw her. Christie’s films of the time not only interweave temporally and diegetically disparate sequences to more and less complicated degrees, as in The Go-Between (1970) and Don’t Look Now (1973), but often exploit these forms of montage to amplify some question about the Christie figure’s imbrication within, or remoteness from, the political conditions, flows, and crises of her moment. If Christie manifests an image with “no woman inside” then what Kael derides as distasteful I appreciate as unusual and theoretically illustrative: the screen actress as herself a singularity, a privileged and permeable leitmotif amid a plane of active and contingent intensities, “empty” except insofar as it both distills and takes its shape from those forces that converge

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

187

“Swinging” or “subversive”?: Julie Christie (with Warren Beatty) in Shampoo (Hal Ashby, Columbia Pictures, 1975). Personal collection of Nick Davis.

around and upon it. Christie’s acting depends neither on the reiterated, studio-style “personifications” of studio-era stars (Katharine Hepburn’s hauteur, Greta Garbo’s androgynous mystique, Julie Andrews’s buoyant clarity), nor on the virtuosic “impersonation” techniques of a Meryl Streep or Ellen Burstyn (Hollinger 17). Her wry, riffy style of acting works against the grain of realist, holistic characterization, instead emphasizing ironic line readings, prismatic facial expressions, and wistful, translucent postures and gestures. This approach lends her performances a unique, creative artistry while inviting or even demanding loose, nonprescriptive modes of filmmaking to fill her “emptiness,” to capitalize on her penchant for simultaneous insinuation and aloofness. This approach to acting holds no innate political value or character, and two of Christie’s earliest films in the seventies, Joseph Losey’s The GoBetween and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, make clear that she and her collaborators could persist in a style that privileges her “singular” presence within temporally complex and psychologically enigmatic narratives, without catalyzing any dense or ambitious plane of political forces around her. The dramatic structure of The Go-Between mitigates doubly against trenchant political inquiry. The narrative centers on a naïve schoolboy named Leo, snared into the scandalous erotic machinations of his late Victorian elders; narrating in voiceover and in short, sporadically interpolated scenes, the now-elderly Leo sounds more alert than ever to how little he understands, then or now, the events in which he was implicated. The ostentatious finery of the costumes and production design, the severe gazes exchanged

188

NICK DAVIS

among the actors, the portentous zooms and piano chords, and the motifs of voyeurism, vigorous dining, and visible anxiety all make clear that The Go-Between grasps the social idiom of turn-of-the-century aristocracy as deeply neurotic, hypocritical, and treacherous. Christie, playing one of the lovers who exploits Leo as an emissary, often looms large in low-angled shots approximating his perspective. In these shots and in others where she languishes on hammocks or in gardens, or when she casts conspiratorial glances at the boy she has recruited as her courier, her characteristic association with the impenetrable or the unknowable devolves more from the childish, proto-lustful adoration of young Leo and the opaque, ambivalent nostalgia of his older self than from any political sensibility in The GoBetween. The film lacks, for example, any expanded view of, or any crosssectional intelligence about, social architecture and power relations. Christie, coquettish and Cheshire, cajoling and only occasionally curt, her hair piled high and then, at inevitable moments, rivering downward with her corset and skirts, presents Marian Trimingham as an enigma but not a politically articulate one. Neither for Leo nor for the audience does the exposure of Marian’s secrets enable any new insights beyond bare cliché into caste, power, or social organization. The novelties and ingenuities of form in Don’t Look Now also seem paradoxically bound to Victorian preoccupations, specifically with an exaggerated stereotype of Italian malfeasance, even as the notoriously frank sexuality and Roeg’s elliptical grammars of editing and narrative reach selfconsciously for the cutting edge. Whereas the underpinnings of menace are submerged throughout The-Go-Between, they surge almost literally across the image in Don’t Look Now. They start from an early point, the famous prologue, when the daughter of the characters played by Christie and Donald Sutherland drowns in a pond, just as Christie is poring over the properties of water in an encyclopedia and Sutherland spills the contents of a drinking glass across a light table. Through bodily movements, story points, and match cuts, Christie emerges in this sequence as a doppelganger for her endangered daughter, as a casually restless reader and truth-seeker, and as an object of silent erotic contemplation for her husband, who pauses for several beats in the kitchen just to observe as she shifts her weight around the couch and searches for something among the cushions. Christie persists in all three facets through the film, her body enervated and her expression remote as she frets in Venetian canals and trespasses into occult visions and forms of knowing. Even more than The-Go-Between, Don’t Look Now is built as a puzzle box, and Christie’s Laura Baxter is a rueful, strenuously “casual,” offhandedly

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

189

gorgeous presence, passing in single sequences from spontaneous helpmeet to fainting convalescent, energized and then haunted by superstitious belief, furrowed with grief and worry and later with well-founded paranoia. The film almost refuses to venture into the dense cultural or political valences of the totemic artifacts, superficially homologous shapes, and psychologically abstracted spaces through which the characters move. If, however, Don’t Look Now opts not to probe levels of meaning in the world beyond its pastiche of Gothic and Victorian tropes and Roeg’s taut formal experiments, it certainly solidifies Christie’s association with prismatic connotations and unstable realities. Laura’s identity and backstory, beyond her sharp maternal grief, barely exists apart from the paranormal eddies of what happens to and around her. As abetted, then, by these recurrent associations with crises in meaning and subversions of self-evidence, Christie’s presence and performances in more ideologically attuned or self-consciously “political” films tend strongly to reinforce, even to embody in some idiosyncratic way, the powerful contradictions and revisionisms, political and otherwise, for which those films were so widely hailed. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) has been so celebrated for its ironic and baleful rescripting of the western mythos that its successes in these directions hardly need repeating. However, Christie’s pivotal and conclusive role in Robert Altman’s elegiac essay does merit underscoring. As written, the role of Constance Miller serves as a harshly pragmatic, sexual, and self-anesthetizing foil and counselor to the headstrong and selfdeluding individualism of McCabe (Warren Beatty). Christie’s performative mode of sketched, improvisatory suggestion rather than Method subjectivity or generic typology resonates perfectly with the film’s own penchant for oblique historiography and reverse discourse. She defamiliarizes the conventional portrait of the shrewish, money-minded madam just as the film estranges our view of national and personal triumphalism, and her quality of “singularity”—renewed in each film through specific creative choices, but engrained, by this point, as the recurrent hallmark of her screen persona— pushes Altman’s film away from a susceptibility to misogyny. A straightforwardly rendered Constance Miller, sarcastically maligned by her own name, could only be an abrasive caricature, while a porous, preoccupied, finally unreachable Constance has, by definition, other things going on. More importantly, as McCabe increasingly “mourns . . . the lost possibility of community and the enforced isolation of its members” and “refuse[s] to situate the viewer comfortably in an easily observable space” (Kolker 340, 342), Christie’s face and aura, at once ethereal and earthy, become the emblems and conduits for Altman’s involvement of the viewer and for the

190

NICK DAVIS

Porous, preoccupied, unreachable: Christie in the last shot of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, Warner Bros., 1971). Personal collection of Nick Davis.

literally prismatic ending. After a zoom toward Christie’s recumbent body and into her opium-dulled gaze, we inhabit her point of view for the final shot, looking through and tangentially across the glinting facets of a marble egg. Thus McCabe concludes, not with the sealed narrative of the felled hero, but with the lingering, uncertain persistence of the solitary monad Mrs. Miller, suturing us into her gaze—a promontory from which the view is colorful but barely revealing. By this “gaze” I do not, of course, mean to imply the kind of hegemonic, specular master-position that Laura Mulvey and other psychoanalytic critics have so trenchantly decried, and indeed, Christie’s characters in the seventies rarely if ever speak to “woman” in the contours most familiar from feminist filmmaking and theory of that decade: that is, as the embodiment of lack or the quarry of fetishistic violence or the Mulveyan soldier against pleasure (Mulvey 21). Her onscreen “hieroglyph,” however, participated in that “new conceptual relation between questions of history, memory, and politics” and that vexed artistic and political charge “not to communicate but to transmit the uncommunicable” that D. N. Rodowick casts as foundations of the figural as opposed to the symbolic, the linguistic, the explicit, or the dogmatic (xv, 14). As Constance Miller, and later as Jackie in Shampoo or as Susan in Demon Seed (1977), she conjures a notion of womanhood, not as “self-actualized” individualism, but as something more ephemeral and utterly contingent on temporal and political context: “a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field” (Deleuze and Guattari 276), or, in Rosi Braidotti’s paraphrase, “the actualization of the immanent encounter between forces which are apt mutually to affect and exchange parts of each

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

191

other in a creative and empathic manner. . . . ‘Becoming-woman’ is a moment, a passage, a line of flight which bypasses empirical women per se” (303). If Christie’s accumulating images “bypass empirical women per se,” again presenting a figure with “no woman inside,” she does so by subordinating the empirical to the “atomic” and the “immanent,” by sundering clear distinctions between the “inside” and “outside.” She repeatedly summons “a passage, a line of flight”: it is worth remembering that the defiantly unresolved conclusion of McCabe virtually ends on Christie’s face, and the closing scenes of Don’t Look Now, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait (1978) find her characters boating, driving, or walking off to horizons unknown. In none of these cases does she squarely encounter Politics as the protagonists of The Conversation (1974) or All the President’s Men (1976) do—that is, in the guises delineated in recent canonizations of seventies-era “political cinema” like the documentary A Decade Under the Influence (2003) have taught us to understand the era’s popular American cinema and its insubordinate ideologies. Although the makers of that film turn to Christie for an early, talking-head précis of the period’s political flashpoints, nothing in A Decade Under the Influence explains how she or her movies would find any foothold in the important but often reductive sense of “the political” that frequently defines our own discourse as academics and filmgoers, as commemorators and citizens. Christie’s images and performances of the seventies are not fully divorced from politics of these more conventional, institutional varieties, but they do dramatize the tension between the “personal” and the “political,” and they tend to locate both within a broad envelope of melancholia, a drifting state among uncertain contexts and uninspiring prospects. In Shampoo, Christie glides around the placards and chatter surrounding George McGovern’s stunted 1968 presidential campaign without seeming to absorb any of it; her Jackie just wants a good haircut and some steady company. Crucially, and in keeping with this actress’s connotations of uncertainty and unfixity, Jackie has less clear romantic and sexual loyalties than any of the other female principals in Shampoo. Whether and with whom she will “settle” is almost as central a question about her as it is about Beatty’s George through all the twists of the sex-farce plot. In many ways, her ambivalence and refusal of stable coupledom outlasts even his, and in the finale, she embarks upon an ambiguous future even as George pleads for togetherness, marriage, babies—an abrupt avalanche of heteronormativity. If Beatty’s promiscuous, attractive, but finally disappointing George invites at least some resonance with how the film presents its other George (McGovern, that failed libidinal object of the Democratic electorate), then

192

NICK DAVIS

the sad-eyed inertia of Christie’s Jackie, more intimate with Beatty’s George but also more skeptical about him than any of his other paramours, stands in some slightly privileged relation to Shampoo’s palpable expression of democratic depression. Jackie is often hedonistic and crude—“It’s so good to wake up in the morning with your rent paid,” she sighs to Goldie Hawn’s Jill—but Christie plays her despondency with quiet sincerity, without disguising Jackie’s culpability for her own loneliness. The camera, meanwhile, treats her not as a personified punch line about crass femininity or lurid class-privilege, as Lee Grant’s Felicia unquestionably is, but as an admittedly pampered embodiment of some pained, veiled, and stubbornly inchoate force. She is repeatedly shot from behind or over the shoulder, including in the first long shot that introduces her to the film, and is just as often framed between sparring, inattentive men. Through her comportment and her very presence, Christie thus raises the question about whether Jackie’s chronic dolor and romantic alienation are self-conscious expressions of the national malaise or whether they are instead more local symptoms of a rarefied, southern California hedonism that disavows any political consciousness, including that of national malaise. She helps skew the film away from simple sarcasm and toward the production of open questions. Indeed, Jackie is a font of questions: “Did you?” “Did you or didn’t you?” “We are?” “Why?” “What are you trying to do?” She is something of a walking question herself, an icon of late-sixties image-obsession who sulks and moons around a seventies movie, wondering who she is, whose darling she will finally become, and whether or when she’s gone right or gone wrong. Given its talking points and the reputations of its makers, Shampoo is easier to credit as an encapsulation of political moods than Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed has often been. Yet even that critically disdained and vicious grotesquerie in which Christie finds herself menaced, then imprisoned, then raped, and finally impregnated by her husband’s half-sentient computer, extends the politically contentious vein in her body of work. Christie escapes outright objectification without proffering as an alternative a rounded, traditionally sympathetic mimesis of subjectivity. By the climax of Demon Seed, both actress and character in their growing impassivity refuse to deny their points of likeness with the machine. Rodowick’s updating of figural philosophy to the new-media age—“Either the machine wants to enter the body as a direct neurophysiological connection, or more radically, the mind wants to shed the body entirely in downloading itself to the machine” (39)—sums up the thematic, the psychological, even the narrative thrusts of Demon Seed. All of these are left unsettled by the zooms and crossdissolves into Christie’s eerie torpor and the reverse gaze of the computer’s

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

193

newly hatched child, a dead ringer for the protagonist’s own deceased daughter. As Deleuze and Guattari prophesize, the energy of becomingwoman, incompatible with the grammars and structures of womanhood as defined in almost any other theoretical lexicon, inexorably gives way to the machinic, unruly phenomenon of “becoming-child.” When Demon Seed’s progenitive computer espouses its motives for its terrorizing behavior in the film’s last act, preeminent among them is its rage at humanity for fetishizing technology at all costs, for ravishing the global ecosystem, and for pillaging the oceans of their natural resources. Coincidentally or not, these were the very platforms for which Christie herself was becoming politically visible in the late seventies, and for which her paper-thin character staunchly crusades in Heaven Can Wait, a venture dimly and cheekily recalled by Christie as “that film I did with Warren about somebody who turns into a football player” (in Callan 175). Suffice it to say that Christie’s Betty Logan, who storms into the Beatty character’s library yelling, “I’m not leaving until you know what I have to say!,” has rather less to say by the screenplay’s end on behalf of staunchly anticorporate politics than she initially suggests. “Pagglesham! Pagglesham! It’s what we’re talking about!” she admonishes Beatty’s distractible tycoon, in reference to the British hamlet from which Betty hails, and whose citizens she hopes to protect from the planned construction of an oil refinery. The film, too, proves distractible, making Betty determinedly peripheral despite her initial vociferousness, and dressing her perpetually in gray-on-gray ensembles or long tan coats or highcollared and long-sleeved dresses in the beige family. To whatever extent the character is implicated in the film’s comedy, she seems to be an embodied joke about the dour colorlessness of activism. Certainly, one must rely on one’s extratextual knowledge of the long-term Beatty-Christie affair to make any sense of the romance that blooms between their Heavenly alter egos. Whether it’s the film or the actress that renders Betty Logan so strangely blunt and monochromatic, Heaven Can Wait makes clear, if only in the breach, how much this character departs from the runic and molecular Christie of the late sixties and the bulk of the seventies: a figure so often doubled and dispersed in shifting guises within and across her films, and one paradoxically consistent, if at all, in her very evanescence and inscrutability. When these films reimagine a style or genre in an ideologically attuned or counter-mythological way (as in McCabe), or when they sound the echoes between personal, erotic, and national affect (as in Shampoo), or when they map the analogous vulnerabilities of the body, the film star, and the natural world through the trope of rapacious technology (as in Demon Seed), Julie Christie’s steady and accumulating connotations with the fractal, the

194

NICK DAVIS

empty, the inchoate, and the evolving make her somehow representative of these various affronts to master narrative, even as her repeated shapeshiftings and deterritorializations trouble the whole discourse of “representation” or “iconicity.” Over the next thirty years, her onscreen and offscreen image would bespeak more overtly “political” facets and commitments, some of them as literal as Betty Logan’s soapboxing in Heaven Can Wait, though never again at the comic expense of the character, and almost always more pivotally to the plot and meanings of the film. Nonetheless, these later, more brazenly leftist, increasingly non-Hollywood films— including Memoirs of a Survivor (1981), Heat and Dust (1983), The Gold Diggers (1983), and Miss Mary (1986)—should not overshadow, nor could they have arisen without, the more diffuse politics and the recombinations of subject, icon, style, context, and temporality that were and are the legacy of Christie’s first full decade of luminous, peculiar stardom.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Vanessa Redgrave: The Singularity Connects

Vanessa Redgrave’s image career in the seventies recycled the least provocative of its sixties templates for quite a while. She had doubly vaulted to prominence in 1966 with Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, an oddball New Wave valentine to Marx, for which she won the Best Actress award at Cannes, and with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, a resounding commercial success and an exemplary braiding of mod textures with the solemn preoccupations of the Continental modernists. Yet despite these landmark successes, Redgrave’s third film appearance in 1966, a walk-on as Anne Boleyn in Fred Zinnemann’s scrupulously tasteful film of A Man for All Seasons, proved a better harbinger of where her film career would mostly reside (one is tempted to say “languish”) for the next decade. She again collaborated with Reisz and again accepted a trophy at Cannes for their florid biography of Isadora Duncan, but this film and three collaborations with husband Tony Richardson typify the New Wave’s late-sixties recession beneath a tide of lavish biopics and period spectacles, brittle comedies, and affected oddities like Richardson’s Red and Blue and The Sailor from Gibraltar (both 1967). Excepting Ken Russell’s boundary-pushing, orgiastic parable The Devils (1971), to which Redgrave supplied a memorably Expressionist portrait of distorted desire and frustrated zeal, her work in the seventies was resolutely middlebrow, in marked contrast to her already-controversial political stances. Redgrave remained mostly loyal to British filmmaking—perhaps to a fault, failing to do much more than pass through the motions of generi-

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

195

cally familiar, thematically narrow, and cosmetically “periodized” scripts like those of Charles Jarrott’s Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Alan Bridges’s Out of Season (1975), and John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979). The intellectual and ideological limitations of Yanks may seem especially galling to viewers looking to Redgrave’s films for any traces of her fiery activist stances against laundered history and bourgeois quietism. The film begins with the kinds of expository captions that portend a historically nuanced or at least a pointedly uneasy look at the clashes of cultures and ideas during World War II, even among Allied units: “From early 1942 until the invasion of Europe,” they tell us, “over a million Americans landed in Britain. . . . Hardly a city, town, or village remained untouched.” Here the text ceases, auguring a sort of open-ended epidemic (they’re everywhere!) rather than a discrete historical thesis, and symptomatically indicating that Yanks is never sure what it wants or needs to say about British-American relations during the war. Reciprocal gazes of distrust and misgiving aside, the film invests heavily in the kind of pedigreed, gauzy, white elephant that Schlesinger’s career-making movies of a decade earlier, to say nothing of so much seventies cinema, seemed designed to disrupt. The depersonalized pacing and points of view, buttering the actors and gliding nostalgically over the various dioramas of Churchill’s England, muffle most of the potential charge in the film’s social portraiture, to include its most famous scene of race-baiting and violence between black and white patrons of a wartime dance hall. Haloed by the cinematography and dampened by Schlesinger’s overall handling of tone, Redgrave’s Helen appears to beam and grin incongruously from amid this docile avatar of mainstream collective memory. Playing the cello, worrying over her son’s homesick distress at boarding school, tipping ever closer toward an affair with William Devane’s American officer, neither character nor actress looks deeply preoccupied by any but the most privatized personal problems. When Redgrave did venture out of Britain, the yields were rarely more auspicious: typical were Michael Cacoyannis’s The Trojan Women (1971), in which she led an international cast through a static, English-language staging of Euripides; several small-scale Italian productions, most of them costarring second husband Franco Nero, that made little critical or commercial impact; and multiple exercises in Hollywood pastiche and period drama, including Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1975), and Agatha (1979). By any reasonable account, regardless of the fame and awards that accrued to Redgrave during these years—and leaving aside, for the moment, the anomaly of Julia (1977)—this repertoire through the end of the seventies does not suggest a major career. Nor does it rhyme with one’s intuition

196

NICK DAVIS

of what projects might attract or make fullest use of such a radicalized woman and performer, a leading organizer within the Workers Revolutionary Party in England after 1973 and a two-time candidate for parliamentary elections under that auspice (Redgrave 194ff). Compounding the general mismatch between Redgrave’s prodigious reputations as artist, intellectual, and rabble-rouser on one hand, and, on the other, the aesthetic modesty and ideological vacuity of her onscreen vehicles is the fact of how little Redgrave actually figures in many of these films, often in vestigial plotlines. She has a handful of scenes in the truncated romantic plot of Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), one set-piece sequence in The Trojan Women, the lead in the more stunted and diffuse of Yanks’s two narratives, and small- to cameosized roles in the ensembles of A Man for All Seasons and Orient Express. At least in the latter, Redgrave’s role as the smirking, tartly glamorous Mary Debenham was no more constricted than those of the entire retinue of upscale stars surrounding her: Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Jacqueline Bisset, and more. To be fair, the spectacular thrill and the commercial percentage in adapting these Agatha Christie potboilers always lay more in the glittering breadth of the casts, not in the depth of their assigned roles or thespian executions. All the same, there is something uniquely disheartening about spotting Redgrave’s radicalleftist image slotted within such a frank apotheosis of the hoarding of bluechip actors as value-added commodities, shilled out for name recognition without garnering much to do. Nevertheless, popular and critical discourse around Redgrave continually strives to express an element of profound intensity in her acting. David Thomson characterizes her as “a brilliant human exclamation mark” (738), prone to recalibrating the center of gravity in her films rather than the other way around, and Pauline Kael credits her with a Brechtian insistence on audience-involving effects, rejecting naturalized performance for a perpetual and unpredictable stream of productivity. “Though many moviegoers,” Kael opines, “would probably be happy to bask in her goddess image, she insists on doing something for them, on giving them the most imaginative performance she can. . . . One never knows what audacity she will attempt, what heights she’ll scale” (For Keeps 382). These kinetic embellishments of her scripted lines and actions and her taut, peculiar vividness in close-up prove especially beneficial to films like Agatha, which, despite the somber lighting and the convoluted plot of erotic jealousy and lethal conspiracy, operates almost concertedly against the preservation of mystique (and engages not a whit with any political stratum of the author’s being or any ideological context for her experience). Offering a speculative narrative

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

197

about the eleven days in 1926 when Orient Express author Agatha Christie notoriously broke contact with everyone she knew, refusing to divulge details upon her reemergence, Agatha fills up with linear and semi-plausible incidents an interlude that is surely more transfixing as an unresolved “line of flight” within a famous public career. Without Redgrave’s face, shrouded in the shadow of her cloche hats, blazing with aquamarine intensity as she grapples with unvoiced feelings and gestates her perverse stratagems, and without her agitated body, bobbing anxiously around a swimming pool, striding tensely among gravestones, skulking surreptitiously around the medieval-looking devices for jazz-age hydrotherapy, Agatha’s flat and mannered forms of pastiche would yield few other intimations of real mystery. Other critics highlight Redgrave’s aptitude for generating these ironic, imaginative, or etherealizing effects despite being so habitually sequestered in compressed corners or secondary tracks of her films. Vincent Canby of the New York Times, for example, panned Yanks but toasted Redgrave’s ability to “find humor and common sense in parts that virtually don’t exist” (“Before the Battle,” 19 September 1979, C17). The actress’s collaborators frequently take recourse to the same idolizing and mystical rhetoric, eliciting even more than most performers do what Karen Hollinger laments as “the reverie approach, which sees performance as ineffable and seeks to discuss it through ‘adulation, anecdote, and reminiscence’” (4). In 1968, Jane Fonda named her daughter after Redgrave, “the only actress I knew who was a political activist” (Fonda 203). She further describes how “watching her work is like seeing through layers of glass, each layer painted in mythic watercolor images, layer after layer, until it becomes dark,” and how Redgrave was the only other scene partner in Fonda’s career who duplicated Brando’s penchant for evoking “another reality, working off some secret, magnetic, inner rhythm that made me have to adjust to him rather than maintaining my own integrity in the scene” (365–66). Julia, the film on which Fonda and Redgrave joined forces, holds the distinctive honor of epitomizing certain trademarks of Redgrave’s seventies film performances while also suffusing them with a long-postponed political relevance to match the actress’s offscreen persona. Furthermore, Julia channels this politicized appropriation of Redgrave’s “singularity” into a narrativized rapport with another female character, played, as it happens, by another radicalized actress, who traced her own incipient ideological epiphanies to first watching Redgrave stand and command the floor at a 1965 progressive fundraiser in Los Angeles (Fonda 165–66). Granted, Julia preserves the established tendency to restrict Redgrave’s appearances to a modicum of screen time, even less, apparently, than in the original script,

198

NICK DAVIS

With Jane Fonda, Redgrave’s “singularity” channeled in Julia (Fred Zinnemann, Twentieth Century–Fox, 1977). Personal collection of Nick Davis.

due in part to the actress’s own excisions of superfluous dialogue (Redgrave 219–20). Just as typically, for this artist’s career and for Hollywood in general, the film’s ostensibly political story unfolds in a historically distant context and focalizes the gradually punctured naïveté of an American innocent (Fonda’s Lillian Hellman) rather than the intellectual fluency and immersed commitment of radicalized citizens and coalitions (including Redgrave’s Julia). The glossy conservatism of the governing aesthetic, cultivated by the same director, Fred Zinnemann, who had cast Redgrave in A Man for All Seasons, stands fully apart from the countercultural cinema to which Christie owed her concurrent maturation through the seventies. These aspects of Julia all smack of entrenchment within middlebrow paradigms; even the antifascist resolve and ingenuity of Redgrave’s character, however ironic in life, still borders on the generic within mainstreamliberal cinema. Still, what Julia supplies to Redgrave’s legacy, with exciting orneriness toward Hollywood convention, is the fascinating profusion and diffusion of Julia’s bond(s) with the film’s Lillian. The script’s moments of proselytism are few and vague: “It’s wrong, it’s wrong, Lilly . . .” Outstripping them in quantity and impact are the glimpses of Julia interpolated into Lillian’s gossamer memories or abrupt free-associations, all of them placing Julia as Lillian’s figure of the Possible. Julia, as corporeal and conceptual hieroglyph, withstands incessant, intensive mutations: she evolves from teenager to adult woman, she moves to Vienna, she speaks when we do not see her, she resists and assaults oppressors in dumb-show inserts, she loses her voice, she mimes a warning from inside a full-body cast, she loses a leg,

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

199

she evaporates from a hospital bed, she takes the prosthetic and metonymic forms of her shadowy co-conspirators, she reveals the existence of a child, she merges the roles of friend and taskmaster, she dies in a scene of subjective fantasy, she vanishes—along with her rumored daughter—into thin air. These re-formations and “reterritorializings” of Julia prompt the production of the film’s fantasy space (as Lillian’s projections, her scenes are the least literal and the most alluringly coded) and of Lillian’s constant, interrelated desires: to know, to befriend, to imitate, to reconnect with, to assist, to protect, to grieve, and to recover Julia. The film’s circumspection does not preempt the question of erotic desire. “I have had plenty of time to think about the love I had for her, too strong and too complicated to be defined only as the sexual yearnings of one girl for another,” Hellman writes in the memoir that inspired the film. “And yet certainly that was there” (114). It is there, too, as part of the kaleidoscopic breadth of Redgrave’s mysterious and alluring performance, vocally and cosmetically sharp-edged despite all the intimate expressions of devotion and the romantic softness of the lighting. One’s sense of Lillian and Julia and their interconnectedness, their creation of each other even (especially?) after Julia’s death, mirrors the form of those distended, fantastical sentences, giddy explosions of personified subjectivity, that they construct together as a childhood game: “I am Paris, and I am a string of beads on a hot dancer and a romantic Frenchman comes into my room . . .” What is Julia if not an exquisite corpse? The politics of Julia as film and of Redgrave as figure surpass antifascism and anti-Semitism: as the actress’s incendiary Oscar acceptance speech proved, subjecting her to charges of anti-Semitism, these intended valences of her persona could be swiftly and starkly undermined. More durably, Redgrave and Julia encompass a notion of women recognizing, mobilizing, and constituting each other: becoming-women, with DeleuzoGuattarian as well as colloquially consciousness-raising overtones. In either sense, whether of coming to recognize oneself or of evolving mercurially into something other than simply “oneself,” this drama of women’s becoming, through and with each other, has no preordained ideological upshot except insofar as the prospect seems radically novel, expansive and under-explored as a plane of personal and political possibility. Significantly, to the extent that Lillian narrates Julia and constitutes the focalized perspective for virtually all of its scenes, the film figures her memories of Julia, her pursuits of Julia, and her becoming via Julia as the audience’s narrative, memorial, and conceptual odyssey as well. Redgrave’s elliptical, suggestive, diamantine style of acting—her eyes focused and glistening, her open mouth suggestive of feeling and emphasis even beyond what she expresses,

200

NICK DAVIS

her “secret, magnetic, inner rhythm”—etches out the character as indicated by Julia’s script but leaves itself translucently, perhaps self-consciously open to the audience’s projections, their myriad impulses to connect with Julia. Despite the occasional headlining role, Redgrave’s screen career has retained its emphasis on supporting roles in the thirty years since Julia, including a steady stream of borderline cameos. As Danae Clark advises in Negotiating Hollywood, it is intellectually jejune and politically limiting to construct “star personas” based solely upon the evidence of screen appearances and textual analysis. To that end, one must acknowledge that Redgrave’s eligibility for larger and more numerous film roles has frequently been constrained by the fallout from her uncowed activism. Her memoirs detail the experiences of belatedly acquiring copies of her FBI and CIA surveillance files (“I can easily see why . . . I got few major film offers and, when I did, was refused a visa” [Redgrave 180]) and of having her speeches blatantly misquoted or meretriciously uncontextualized, and of the documentaries she produced, such as The Palestinian (1977) and Occupied Palestine (1980), eliciting prejudicial reportage and scant exhibition. Her unceremonious firing in 1982 from an advertised concert performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and her subsequent, high-profile lawsuit against the orchestra suggest that Redgrave has plenty of warrant to assert in her autobiography that “I certainly have lost much of my film career because of this kind of misreporting” (241). Likewise, her record of devoting her salaries to the building of schools, to the bankrolling of Marxist and radical leftist projects, and to the posting of bail for political prisoners reframes her film appearances, even or especially her most “mainstream” and therefore munificent projects, as conditioned by more than textual considerations. And yet, at risk of hermetically privileging her realized performances over her fraught biography and complex negotiations as an “actor as worker” (Clark 12), one would also straiten and simplify the richness of Redgrave’s professional record by disregarding its representational leitmotifs. Where Julie Christie’s movies in five successive decades have tended to disentangle her from couples and crowds—stranding her in airports, on operating tables, and at funerals, separating her from partners more often than uniting them, estranging her from her inhuman spawn or opting for single motherhood of as-yet unborn children—Redgrave’s performances usually operate and conclude differently. She has often used her smaller ration of screen time to connect with other characters, often other women, sometimes with the audience through straight-to-camera address, as in The Fever (2004), Atonement (2007), and even the one-woman stage play The Year of Magical Thinking (2007). From

JULIE CHRISTIE AND VANESSA REDGRAVE

201

these foundations, Redgrave redraws the geometries by which all of these “characters,” including ourselves, view our ties to the world and to each other. Again, these valences and evolutions of Redgrave’s image, her propensity for signaling intense and complex affect even in brief appearances and her capacity for inciting profound and unforeseen linkages among her acquaintances and communities, can work in any number of tonal directions. In The Devils, Redgrave’s crabbed, hunchbacked, and luridly excitable nun is both a key emblem and a catalyzing agent for the orgiastic crises and the epidemic hypocrisies that sweep through her convent and across the bone-white city of Loudon. In Playing for Time, scripted by Arthur Miller and filmed at the end of the seventies, she plays Fania Fenelon, the determinedly stoic musician whose singing and choral arranging keep dozens of women alive in Auschwitz, each of them implicated in a wrenching act of coerced and collective becoming; Fania’s moral agonies and outward emaciation mirror, absorb, resist, pass into, draw fuel from, and draw fire from the other women of the barracks, among whom the soundtrack and the framings continually blur any easy distinctions. They are profoundly different movies, bracketing Redgrave’s career in the seventies, pivoting as does Julia on her enigmatic figure, but drawing other figures and other lives into, around, and through her figure in a complex synthesis of public and interpersonal becomings that can hardly fail to be political. Christie’s image, like Redgrave’s, has been posing, figuring, and reproducing these sorts of questions since her own landmark performances of the seventies. Witness her most recent “comeback” in Away from Her (2006), where her character Fiona’s mental deterioration troubles some of her most intimate bonds while enabling a mysterious connection with a fellow patient. Once more, she fades away at the conclusion, but not before another paradigmatic Julie Christie moment in which Fiona, amid her own senescence, watches TV footage of the Iraq war and diagnoses the world, not herself, with ruinous amnesia. Leftist crusaders in “real” life, Christie and Redgrave have screen personas that fascinate precisely for the vacillations and contingencies of their politics. Whether as darlings or as devils, as demon progenitors or disappeared radicals, their images have prompted more puzzles than stable platforms, but the world and the audience seem somehow deeply implicated in whatever it is they stand for. AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S I owe profuse thanks to James Morrison for his invitation, and to Derek Matson, Tim Robey, and Jeffrey Masten for their editorial suggestions.

10 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ Donald Sutherland The Politics and Erotics of Submission JEAN WALTON

When Donald Sutherland burst onto the American film scene with his portrayal of Hawkeye in the unexpected Robert Altman hit M*A*S*H (1970), the popular press couldn’t seem to agree on how best to characterize this new “un-Hollywood” star, fixing by turns on his Canadian background, his political activism, or his “funny peculiar” sense of humor (Dorothy Manners, “Sutherland—‘Actors Should Be Involved in Pertinent Causes,’” L.A. Examiner Sunday, 12 July 1970, n.p.; Douglas Marshall, “The Funniest Film Actor Canada Has Ever Produced,” Maclean’s, 1 September 1970, 42). After the release a few months later of Kelly’s Heroes (1970), it became routine to refer to Sutherland’s “oddball” status (a term borrowed 202

DONALD SUTHERLAND

203

from the anachronistic hippie tank commander he played in that movie); but “oddball” was really a catch-all term, the euphemism that would substitute for everything about Sutherland that was too politically challenging, aesthetically complex, or sexually inassimilable to be captured in routine pop journalism. It was the “New Faces” section of Look magazine that hit on perhaps the most suggestive way of summing up what was truly “odd” about this gangly, charismatic actor, informing us that in life as well as in art, Sutherland practiced a “self-loss” that (as he put it) “allows you to be totally compassionate” (Ira Mothner, 3 November 1970, 72). Throughout the 1970s, this “self-loss” could be said to inform all aspects of Sutherland’s persona, especially at the corporeal level: whether he was engaged in acting, activism, or acts of intimacy, an element of surrender, self-effacement, and bodily vulnerability informed his on- and offscreen image making. And in a fond, foolish tendency that survived long after the idealistic sixties, Sutherland seemed to weigh the worth of any endeavor— a country’s domestic or foreign policy, a director’s working style, or the practice of an ethical relation to the world—by whether or not it entailed the proper measure of “love.” Sutherland’s career in the decade of the seventies can be roughly divided into three phases, from his early “movement”-based political activist years (leading up to the close of the Vietnam War), which could also just as easily be called his Jane Fonda years, through the British and European “Auteur” years (with an emphasis on plumbing the depths of what Wilhelm Reich calls “the fascist within”), and culminating in a shift to the “ordinary,” as corporatism ushered in the 1980s. Throughout all three phases, almost all of his background profiles and interviews include an account of his bodily awkwardness, stemming from a painful self-consciousness at being too tall as a youth, of having “Dumbo” ears, of each day meeting a face in the mirror that even his mother had to admit was not “good-looking” but was at least “full of character” (Marshall 42; Martin Knelman, “Donald Sutherland, Actor,” Atlantic Insight, September 1980, 43; Claudia Dreifus, “The Beautiful Giraffe,” Mademoiselle, February 1981, 62). Whatever the moviegoing audience saw and heard in Sutherland’s diverse onscreen performances, this was accompanied by the back story of the vulnerability of his flesh, of his near-death experiences, of his susceptibility to injury and ailment, his clumsiness, his damaged voice, his hypochondria, his lisp, his vertigo, his tendency to blush or weep, his “long frame [that] looks as if it had been molded by a slammed door” (Bruce Bahrenburg, “A New Image for Male Stars,” Newark Sunday News, 3 November 1968, E5)—in short, what generally might be called his corporeal and emotional “subjection” to the world around him.

204

JEAN WALTON

From the outset, almost every interview included the story of how the acting training he sought in Britain “ruined” his voice (Mary Blume, “Sutherland: Unactorish Man Nuts About Acting,” Los Angeles Times, 12 January 1975, 22.); of how he was pronounced dead when suffering from a six-week spell of meningitis caught while shooting Kelly’s Heroes in Yugoslavia (Iain McAsh, “Donald Sutherland, the Happy Wanderer,” Films Illustrated, 6 October 1976, 60); of how he delayed shooting on The Day of the Locust (1975) when he severely cut himself going through a glass door (“Actor’s Home Mishap Delays ‘Day of Locust,’” Variety, 5 March 1974, 4); or of his recurring experience of “terrible vertigo . . . so bad it would be hard for me to stand up on the stage” (Christopher Sharp, “The Pleasure of Each Other’s Company,” Women’s Wear Daily, 28 June 1974, 16). As the decade wore on, profiles began to include accounts of his early bouts with polio, rheumatic fever, hepatitis, infantile paralysis, and scarlet fever, and of his tonsillectomies, mastoidectomy, and appendectomy—in short, of his “sickly” childhood only barely (and miraculously) survived (Richard Grenier, “Looking for Mr. Goodstar?” Cosmopolitan, October 1976, 225; Glenys Roberts, “Donald Sutherland: Devastating Eccentric,” Company, May 1979, 160; Guy Flatley, “Donald Sutherland: A Far From Ordinary Man,” Cosmo, August 1981, 192). “I have a certain clumsiness,” he confesses, and then, only half jokingly, “Canadians, and I am one and proudly so, are forever apologizing for themselves. It’s as though being Canadian is the original sin. But it’s a style, isn’t it?” (Lawrence O’Toole, “A Face to Lead the Way,” Maclean’s, 2 March 1981, 49). Sutherland’s fragile, clumsy bodily style in real life inevitably inflected his onscreen portrayals; to be a Sutherland fan in the seventies was to tune in to a series of characters whose bodies are under siege, always at risk, always susceptible, always not the inviolate body of the action hero but, rather, the body in danger of a malady, a paralysis, an injury, a fall, a haunting, a drenching, a shooting, an impotence, a transformation. What one critic calls the “dry Martini bite of his performance” in M*A*S*H, for instance (Marshall 40), is counterpointed by that awkward hip-joint swivel characteristic of the exceedingly tall person dealing with chronic pain. Don’t Look Now (1973) is, of course, organized around a series of ominous threats to his body, as he struggles against his own susceptibility to occult hauntings: he teeters from high perches around the church he is restoring, suffers a fall from a scaffold, and dangles dangerously from a rope. Despite his vertigo, he stumbles through his own stunt work: regarding Schlesinger’s Day of the Locust, he describes being nearly torn limb from limb when attacked by overenthusiastic extras in the film’s frenzied mob scene; he drives a vintage motorcycle over hill and dale in Sturges’s The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

DONALD SUTHERLAND

205

(and recalls having inadvertently crashed it more than once [Craven 24]); he balances with costar Paul Mazursky atop an elevator as it speeds up and down the shaft in A Man, a Woman and a Bank (1979); and he clambers perilously about the rafters of an industrial pod-nursery in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Even his less memorable films are fascinating to watch for their spectacles of the imperiled Sutherland body: an alarmingly shiny Florida sunburn scorches his fair northern complexion, distracting the solicitous viewer from the incoherence of the plot of Lady Ice (1973). Although he twice fails to enchant audiences by re-teaming with costars he had succeeded with before, we almost forgive him, so gamely does he bumble through the pratfalls, as a congenital klutz who inadvertently destroys the furnishings of his brother’s office and who is most at home crashing demolition derby cars when he rejoins Jane Fonda in the pseudo-wacky Steelyard Blues (1973), and as the conscientious and therefore risible half of a comic CIA duo in the would-be buddy movie, S*P*Y*S (1974). Elliott Gould was his partner in the latter ill-fated effort to re-create a winning team, playing the devil-maycare ladies’ man to Sutherland’s scruple-ridden dupe. It’s Sutherland who sings farcically through the comic fingernail torture scene, or spazzes out when Gould gives him a whiff of a secret drug, or emerges drenched, hair plastered, in the obligatory dunking scene. Gould gets the girl, of course, while Sutherland dons pink rubber gloves to wash dishes in the kitchen. It’s a humor premised on humiliation, and requires that the character harbor principles that leave him open to ridicule. Even during the most impassioned period of his involvement with the far Left, and despite the consistently heterosexual love roles he played, Sutherland’s air of emotional and physical vulnerability lent a pacific sensitivity, a decidedly anti-macho vibe to his image. So even as he played the “man’s man” for a broad sector of the white male middle class, sharing with them an understated but deeply felt outrage at the world’s injustices coupled with a flair for humorous jibes at uptight conformists, he also appealed to the middle-class liberated woman, and could even serve as a possible model for romantic partnership, a help-meet willing to subject himself to a woman’s lead, as in An Act of the Heart (1970), Klute (1971), Don’t Look Now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Man, a Woman, and a Bank, and Ordinary People (1980). In other words, he could be said to offer all the intellectual left-wing politics of a Norman Mailer, without the “male chauvinism.” “Sutherland’s appeal and popularity as an actor indicate what women are responding to today,” writes one enthusiastic female admirer. “He is sympathetic, vulnerable, funny, sexual, un-macho, yet quietly strong and dependable. Off the screen, he blushes

206

JEAN WALTON

and cries easily” (Valerie Wade, “Karen Black and Donald Sutherland,” Viva, June 1975, 60). If he tended to share in the celebrity syndrome of serial weddings and divorces in the sixties, by the seventies he seemed more interested in mutual “partnerships” with the women in his life, and was dubbed in at least one interview as a “critic of traditional marital forms” (Claudia Dreifus, “Donald Sutherland” Playboy, October 1981, 73). Jane Fonda, whom he called “a friend and a compatriot,” seemed as much a comrade to him as a romantic sweetheart (“Those years [with Jane] taught me about the human process, which includes the political process” [Dan Yakir, “Donald Sutherland,” Moviegoer, November 1983, 18]), and his subsequent long-term partnership with Francine Racette was premised on a mutual agreement not to spoil the arrangement by marrying, even after the birth of their three sons (Grenier, “Looking for Mr. Goodstar?” 224; Guy Flatley, “Donald Sutherland: A Far From Ordinary Man,” Cosmo, August 1981, 202). Columnists made much of the fact that he requested a paternity-leave clause in two of his production contracts, so that he could take time off for the births of his sons Roeg and Rossif; in more than one interview he sings the praises of the Bradley method (a natural childbirth technique) that enabled him to deliver both infants; and subsequent profiles found him getting up for the morning feedings, changing diapers, making bread—“losing himself” once again, this time in the domestic mundane (Blume 22; Valerie Wade, “Karen Black and Donald Sutherland” 61; “Doc Sutherland,” People, 30 October 1978, 69)

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Political Activism

The political-activist phase of Sutherland’s seventies stardom was significantly linked to his partnerships with women. His left-wing orientation was fired, in part, in the crucible if not of feminism then certainly of female politicization. One got the sense from his interviews not that he was the revolutionary maverick aided by his supportive wife, but just the reverse: if anything, the women took the initiative and Sutherland found ways to serve as their helpful sidekick. This is not to say, as some critics did, that his politics were not his own. Even during the 1950s at the University of Toronto, when he wore a beard with “long, sometimes bleached hair before such things were fashionable” and “envelop[ed] himself in theatrical capes over faded jeans and sandals, he was a one-man advanced guard for the hippie movement” (Marshall 40). His emerging politicization, as well as his somatic distress, is registered by a description of him as a “down-and-out actor” in London in the sixties,

DONALD SUTHERLAND

207

“clutching a huge box of pills to soothe his hypochondria and obsessed with the topic of capital punishment”(40). By the time he had moved to California with second wife Shirley Douglas and their children (twins Kiefer and Rachel, and an older son of Douglas’s), he clearly embraced an almost Marxist approach to political analysis, focusing not so much on liberal reform, but calling for nothing less than revolutionary structural change. He remarks that a revolution in this country . . . can only happen if the great number of people are educated to want it. Given the institutions that we have at the moment, our ecological or population problems will not be altered, because that does not serve the interests of the institutions. What we are going to have to do is break down the base of those institutions so that they, in fact, serve the people . . . it’s a question of changing the indoctrination of the people. I don’t mean that one should pursue that in a slow, liberal manner: I think it’s got to come much faster, much more radically. (Jacoba Atlas, “Donald Sutherland: A Man for This Season,” Show, April 1971, 41–42)

When asked about his political views in this period, he characteristically criticized the Vietnam War, domestic and foreign policy in the United States, racism, poverty, and indeed, a host of problems attributable to a capitalist system in general. At the same time, he also often deferred to Douglas on such matters, almost as though he were apologetic that his acting career left him less time than he would like to engage in full-fledged activism. “What I think socially and politically is still intuitive,” he remarked. “My wife verbalizes it much more than I do” (Mothner 72). Canadian fans were no doubt more aware than Americans of the full implications of this claim: Shirley Douglas was the daughter of one of Canada’s most highly regarded left-wing politicians, Tommy Douglas, co-founder of the socialist New Democratic Party and designer of Canada’s universal health care plan. Asked whether he should have taken a public stand on the war as a Canadian, Sutherland pointed out that It was not just America’s war. . . . It was an international war. There were Canadian troops fighting there . . . the kind of napalm that you cannot put out, it burns and doesn’t stop burning until it gets to the bone. That was developed in Canada. The Vietnamese have a tradition of family and children and the concept of wounding children was developed in Canada at the University of Montreal. I’ve had an obligation. (Ina Ginsburg, “Donald Sutherland,” Interview, March 1983, 34)

And when confronted by interviewers about the paradox of living in a country about which he was so critical, Sutherland was quick to reply, “It’s

208

JEAN WALTON

not different in Canada, it’s worse in Canada. How can you possibly feel it’s better there when you have an idiot putting in six months of martial law!” (Atlas 43). Sutherland was referring to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of Canada’s War Measures Act in response to the kidnapping of public officials by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in the fall of 1970. Frightened by the mounting violence of Quebec’s radical separatist movement, most Canadians supported this limitation of their civil rights. Tommy Douglas (himself the object of Royal Canadian Mounted Police [RCMP] surveillance) was almost the sole Canadian politician to speak out against the policy, and Sutherland agreed with this position that Trudeau’s extreme measures were no better than Nixon’s paranoid regime in the United States. But even if Canada had offered a desirable alternative to the United States, Sutherland would still remain south of the border, he said, since it is the place where revolutionary change would make the most farreaching impact. Besides, “This is the only country that is dealing with racism . . .” (Mothner 72). During this period, Sutherland primarily appeared in (anti)war films, most notably, of course, M*A*S*H and Kelly’s Heroes, but also the period spoof Start the Revolution without Me (1970) and Dalton Trumbo’s pacifist treatise set during World War I, Johnny Got His Gun (1971). But even the non-war films were somehow, if only by association with his onscreen persona, imbued with peace-movement vibes: in both An Act of the Heart and Little Murders (1971) he plays clergymen who seem, in different ways, to continue in the vein of Hawkeye’s disapproval of the world’s folly (a politically activist Augustinian monk in the former, and the hilarious “apatheticist” minister in the latter). In Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970) he plays a film director (based on Mazursky himself) who, while dodging trivial but commercially promising movie pitches from a shallow studio head, fantasizes about all the “engaged” film projects he could direct, including one featuring a postmodern Vietnam War scene played out on Hollywood Boulevard. Although Alan J. Pakula’s Klute was not specifically about the war, offering a more diffuse analysis of inner-city decay, by the time the film was released Sutherland had separated from Douglas and had come to be known as Jane Fonda’s comrade-against-arms in the escalating antiwar movement that was unfolding on a number of fronts. To watch Klute was to watch America’s most high-profile antiwar celebrity couple of the year. While Fonda and Sutherland kept their personal relationship private, their onscreen romance in Klute, their continued professional association in fundraising events for the Winter Soldier Investigation, their shared

DONALD SUTHERLAND

209

America’s most high-profile antiwar couple of the year: Sutherland and Fonda in Klute (Alan J. Pakula, Warner Bros., 1971). Personal collection of James Morrison.

involvement in the anti-militarist theater troupe F.T.A., and their appearance again as a romantic duo in Steelyard Blues no doubt contributed to the public’s fantasy that they were a couple—a fantasy that Sutherland confirmed in interviews within two years after the relationship ended. Thus, it is safe to say that they modeled a new kind of romantic partnership, more like a political comradeship, in their public appearances, from their presence at the Vietnam Veterans Against the War rally at Valley Forge in the fall of 1970 throughout their appearances with F.T.A. at G.I. coffeehouses, then at a Lincoln Center fundraiser in November 1971, followed by a tour of military bases around the Pacific Rim (having been denied visas to Vietnam), and again in their appearance in the documentary film F.T.A. the following year. Clearly Sutherland and Fonda both chose during this period to treat their “star” status as cultural capital that could be invested for the more important payoff of mobilizing popular sentiment against the war. F.T.A., an acronym borrowed from G.I. newsletters, was understood among disaffected military grunts to signify “Fuck the Army,” although it was jokingly euphemized as “Free the Army” (or as the Free Theater Association). Formed by Fonda, Sutherland, and other like-minded performers in 1971 as an alternative to Bob Hope’s official patriotic entertainment for

210

JEAN WALTON

the troops, F.T.A. was an “anti-military, anti-war revue,” a kind of “political vaudeville” show composed of two hours of “songs, sketches, dances, readings and visual gags whose specific message is ‘You, the enlisted man, can end this war by simply refusing to fight’” (Gornick, “Tour” Pt. 1, 6). It is not surprising that the troupe was trailed by FBI and CIA agents wherever they went, and that they were banned from appearing on military bases and met with visa problems upon landing in the airport in Japan (Gornick, Pt. 1, 6; Pt. 3, 17). F.T.A. was not only about ending the war but also about addressing the rampant social inequities within the U.S. military, itself an intense microcosm of what was happening all over the country. The film, directed by Francine Parker, whose camera crew toured the Pacific Rim with the theater troupe, features highlights from the stage performances and also extensive footage of grassroots resistance efforts to American imperialism in the Philippines: G.I.s exposing what they knew of the hidden secrets of Nixon’s bombing campaign, of the existence of U.S.-owned nuclear weapons where they were not supposed to be, of appalling racism perpetrated by officers on African American troops, of an official policy of sexism toward military women, of the absence of adequate health care or a drug rehabilitation program, and of hundreds of troops lining up to sign petitions to get the U.S. military out of Southeast Asia. It is no surprise that of all Sutherland’s film projects of the seventies, F.T.A. was probably seen by the fewest people, and is to this day still the most difficult to track down. F.T.A. offers an extremely interesting example of Sutherland’s early activist stance, since it is both a film in which he worked with women who were calling the directorial shots (Jane Fonda and Francine Parker) and one in which his role, despite his star status from M*A*S*H and Klute, was no more emphasized than anyone else’s. In this respect, F.T.A. might be seen as an early experiment with self-effacement, this time in relation to the collectivity of the troupe and the troops. F.T.A. is the closest cinematic approximation one could find in this period to a Vertov-inspired revolutionary theater featuring well-known movie stars, with its script drawn from the grass-roots publications of the “people” (in this case, G.I. newspapers) and its agit-prop skits and songs mirroring the G.I.s back to themselves in settings where they watched en masse, enabling them to move beyond their emerging consciousness of their own exploitation by the war machine to a more organized protest against it. F.T.A.’s goal was to move its audience to the next dialectical level, to a consciousness of their power to make history change direction. Sutherland provides the irony-tinged narrative voiceover for the film (the beginning of a long career in voice work, in fact), and we catch glimpses of him sitting with feminist singer Holly Near as they nod at

DONALD SUTHERLAND

211

another performer’s rousing folk song, or stepping, exhausted, onto an airport tarmac as they arrive at their sixth destination in as many days. Fonda and Sutherland, “so far from being accorded star status in the group, appeared to be only two ordinary members of an incredibly hard-working company, who, in their relation one to another, seemed to stand on entirely equitable ground” (Gornick, Pt. 1, 6). Sutherland looked, according to Vivian Gornick, “like a raw-boned Tom Sawyer, his long thin body alive with the nervous beauty of a sensitive colt, his large, horsy, brilliantly proportioned face, and those expressive blue eyes that are constantly working” (Pt. 1, 8). Onstage, with a couple of days’ growth of beard, his hair shortish but shaggy, Sutherland closed the show with his impassioned recital of a passage from Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got his Gun, in which he somberly re-creates the image of the armless, legless, featureless protagonist on his hospital bed, longing to be a symbol for the horror of war so that others would refuse to let it happen in the future. For the most part, G.I. audience reception to the Pacific Rim show was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, except for one incident of harassment by a small group of drunken sailors at the Yokosuka Naval Base, who “jumped on the stage and headed for Donald Sutherland. The cast, like one, surrounded Sutherland; the sailors surrounded them; and 50 GIs jumped out of their seats to join the tumult on the stage. Within seconds, every GI in the audience was ‘radicalized,’ and they were all on their feet” (Gornick, Pt. 3, 18). Significantly, it was Sutherland’s body, in the act of dramatizing the maimed G.I. body, that became the focus of the potential danger courted by the F.T.A. tour, and then the symbol of the vulnerability needing protection by a united collective of individuals whose common purpose was peace. A basic kind of loving, indeed. While some mainstream media critics dismissed Sutherland’s contributions to F.T.A.—remarking, for instance, that he seemed “paralyzed with moral fervor” (Cocks)—wounded veteran Ron Kovic, for one, recalls having been galvanized by Sutherland’s monologue: Sutherland began to read the passage and something I will never forget swept over me. It was as if someone was speaking for everything I ever went through in the hospital. It was as if the book was speaking about me, my wound and the hell it had been coming back and learning to live with it. I began to shake and I remember there were tears in my eyes. (Kovic 1976 149)

Kovic describes this as a turning point in his activism against the war, but by the time his Born on the Fourth of July was published in 1976 (the

212

JEAN WALTON

bicentennial year), F.T.A., and Sutherland’s contribution to it, had long disappeared into the deafening silence on Vietnam that followed the war’s end.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Submission Abroad

If Sutherland’s politics were outward-directed in the early seventies, requiring him to stand tall with other “movement” people and speak the truth to power, the next phase of his political engagement entailed turning his attention inwards to the historical forces that produce the very self which speaks that truth. In his serious films of this period, we see that he no longer plays characters whose political rectitude is unassailably stable. Instead, they occupy more ambiguous political and ethical ground. More important, this shift coincides roughly with a change in the way Sutherland understands his working relations with his directors. Playing righteous characters in the earlier years, he was also the righteous actor, asserting his ego in a power struggle (particularly with Altman and Pakula) over the shaping of the finished product. “[With Alan Pakula] I was behaving in a self-centered way,” he recalls in one interview. “I was very selfrighteous in those days. Now, when I think about the way I was, I just want to cringe” (Dreifus, “Sutherland” 87). After the release of Don’t Look Now in 1973, Sutherland began to recount a cherished story in almost every interview: that of a consequential telephone showdown with director Nicholas Roeg. Troubled by some aspect of the adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s story, Sutherland had wanted Roeg to change the ending to a more upbeat one. Flatly refusing, Roeg told Sutherland he’d have to give up the role if he couldn’t agree to the script as written. “So I thought to myself,” Sutherland’s story goes, “Why not try this? Let’s find out what it’s like to not interfere. That conversation changed my life—changed my whole attitude about acting. Now I think of myself as the director’s plaything. Film acting, basically, is about the surrender of will to the director” (Dreifus, “Sutherland” 88). Thus, the shift from an outward-directed to an inner-oriented politics coincided with a shift from a combative to a submissive relation to the director. In this period, too, Sutherland lent his star status, and a body that was susceptible to both punishment and ecstasy—or perhaps the ecstasy of punishment—to a series of projects dissecting fascism in its various forms. By 1975 Sutherland began quoting from Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, a reissue of which had become popular among some leftist intellectuals looking for a way to inform their Marxism with Freud’s

DONALD SUTHERLAND

213

insights about the unconscious. “According to Wilhelm Reich,” Sutherland observed in one interview, we are all fascists. I know I am and my fascist tendencies really bother me. Sometimes I am quite tormented by them. I find it hard to love humanity. That disturbs me because I feel that as an actor I should understand people and how can you understand without love? Anyway, that’s the reason I did [Bertolucci’s 1900]. Reich’s theory is that we all exist on three levels. The first is our “good behaviour” level, the second our “reacting or social” level and the third our “character” level. It’s when the second and third are combined in the wrong circumstances that you get political fascism. (Craven 21)

This comment is of interest for two things it reveals about Sutherland’s understanding of fascism: first, that to detect fascism in himself is to detect a difficulty in loving “humanity,” which, as Sutherland sees it, makes it impossible to understand people, an understanding that is a prerequisite for his profession. This love he speaks of might seem to refer to the kind of “caritas” modeled by his most compassionate, even empathetic characters, for instance: the conscientious monk in An Act of the Heart, the melancholic Christ of Johnny Got His Gun, even the solicitous John Klute. But it could just as well signal that the “self-loss” attributed to him is the result of a constant struggle with “eros” in its more self-serving libidinous forms and, as we shall see, the middle of the decade begins to take us into some interesting sadomasochistic territory. The second thing to note about Sutherland’s comment that we all exist on “three levels,” is that he was trying to understand fascism in the peculiarly Freudian terms presented in Reich’s book. Reich outlines three layers of the “biopsychic structure” of human reactions, each layer representing a “deposit” of social development. On the “surface layer of his personality the average man is reserved, polite, compassionate, responsible, conscientious,” but all these qualities are only the rind, beneath which a second layer of sadism prevents conscious contact with one’s deepest “natural” or “biological” core in which, under “favorable social conditions, man is an essentially honest, industrious, cooperative, loving, and, if motivated, rationally hating animal” (Reich xi). In order to reach this truly honest, cooperative, and loving core, one must delve beneath the social façade of the outer rind, and yet when this façade is removed it all too often reveals, not what is at the core, but merely the secondary layer of “cruel, sadistic, lascivious, rapacious, and envious impulses” that have been deposited there as a result of mechanistic bourgeois modernity (xi). Political formations are best understood, according to Reich, in their relation to this three-level personality structure: liberalism, for instance,

214

JEAN WALTON

advocates “the characteristics of the surface layer of the character, which is intent upon self-control and tolerance” (xii). By contrast, “everything that is genuinely revolutionary, every genuine art and science, stems from man’s natural biologic core” (xiii). But the case of fascism, Reich writes, “in contrast to liberalism and genuine revolution, is quite different. Its essence embodies neither the surface nor the depth, but by and large the second, intermediate character layer of secondary drives” (xiii). Conceived in this way, fascism must be understood, not as “the dictatorship of a small reactionary clique,” but as “an international phenomenon, which pervades all bodies of human society of all nations” (xiii, author’s emphasis). And elsewhere: “The fascist madman cannot be made innocuous if he is . . . not tracked down in oneself; if we are not conversant with the social institutions that hatch him daily” (xv–xvi, emphasis mine). It was this model of the fascist “in oneself” that Sutherland brought to the Anglo-European auteurist projects he sought out in the mid-seventies. John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust is set in the 1930s, during the rise of political fascism in Europe and the era of preoccupation with celebrity in Hollywood. For this film, Sutherland gained weight and exaggerated the least attractive features of his face to play the sexually repressed Homer Simpson. He portrays Homer as though he’s just barely managing to maintain his veneer of sociability, his “secondary” sadistic impulses breaking through at key moments, as when he clutches a glass of milk so tightly as to break it in his hand, and as when, at the end of the film, he attacks and brutally kills a child who has been tormenting him and is then himself violently murdered by a mob whipped into a sadistic frenzy of their own. Here, he is almost a textbook example of Reich’s repressed sexual “deviant” unable to properly enjoy his “genitality.” Then in John Sturges’s The Eagle Has Landed, he plays a disaffected IRA agent working for the German government during World War II. Not himself a Nazi, he is to land in northern England, take up a disguise as a marsh warden, and prepare the way for a group of German paratroopers. But his seductive qualities turn him almost into a “femme fatale,” insofar as an English “colleen” who falls for him murders the Englishman who would interfere with the German mission to assassinate Churchill. But it is with Bertolucci and Fellini that Sutherland takes the most uncanny plunge into the realm of the fascist within. In 1900, Sutherland played Attila, the film’s quintessential fascist in the context of the class struggle in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. And although Fellini’s Casanova predates this era by 200 years, Fellini himself nevertheless commented that if Casanova had lived in the twentieth century “he would

DONALD SUTHERLAND

215

have been a fascist, close to the powerful, well-liked by Mussolini. He was not only a great know-it-all, a pimp, a behind-the-scenes politician, but he was infantile, astute in the worst sense and egotistical. In other words, an eternal type, a fanatic and a hypocrite” (Melton Davis, “Federico Fellini’s Far-Out Casanova,” New York Times, 31 August 1975, 89). When asked to compare the two directors, Sutherland remarked: “Fellini and Bernardo work differently, and their vision is different. But in each case it’s an act of love” (Louis-Bernard Robitaille, “Brève Rencontre avec Donald Sutherland,” Écran, 15 April 1976, 10, my translation). Sutherland doesn’t elaborate on this idea, but it could be said that the chief participants in this “act” were, in each case, none other than Sutherland and his director, engaged in a kind of sadomasochistic contract that involved the transformation and then spectacularization of Sutherland’s body, and the subordination of his mind. Each director cast him as a character designed to become the focal point for everything that the film was to negate: in Bertolucci’s case, this meant using Sutherland to embody all the repressed sadistic impulses of the other characters in 1900; in Fellini’s case, it meant making Sutherland the “blankness . . . the tabula rasa on which mythic significance could be inscribed” or the “smooth, aloof, faintly stupid” center to contrast with the “richness, corruption, and vitality of the life around him” (Gay 19). In 1900, Sutherland had hoped to introduce nuances into his portrayal of the fascist Attila, to “bring out the conflict in the man and therefore promote some sort of understanding as to why he was what he was” (Craven 21). He sought to present the sort of subtle and profound fascist Wilhelm Reich speaks of, the fascist who slumbers within Western capitalist societies. . . . For me, it was of great importance to play in this film, it was a political act, the act that I know how to do best. Because the character I play, as with all Bertolucci’s films, bears on the central problem posed to western societies: the analysis of the bourgeoisie, with all its ambiguities and its contradictions. (Robitaille 10, my translation)

But Bertolucci had different ideas, wanting, in the words of one critic, to load “onto the shoulders of this Attila the weight of all [the film’s] violence, which the other characters suppress” (Bachmann 19). When Sutherland saw the completed film, he says, “I was shocked. My character emerges as some kind of Frankenstein creature with hob-nailed boots. Please don’t get me wrong. It was entirely my own fault. I made a terrible mistake by trying to create something the director didn’t want” (Craven 21). Indeed, in counterpoint to the emerging politicization of Gérard Depardieu’s communist hero and Robert De Niro’s conflicted padrone, Sutherland’s

216

JEAN WALTON

bodily image in the film becomes more and more grotesquely deformed with age, and is both the origin and target of the film’s most shocking scenes of violence: in one sequence he ties a cat to a post, then head-butts it to death to demonstrate how the communist, no matter how appealing, should be treated; in another scene, after sodomizing a child, he picks him up by his feet and swings him around in a circle, bashing his head against a wall a few times until he is dead. He commits atrocity after atrocity, until, as the political tables turn, he is regaled with dung, grotesquely gored with pitchforks, penned in with the swine, and summarily shot in the head. If Sutherland was disappointed by the outcome of his submission to Bertolucci, he was able to extract a veritable jouissance from his subordination to Fellini in the following year when, during the shooting of Casanova, he become the willing, the submissive, the downright ecstatic receptacle of Fellini’s own ambivalent affect. It should be remarked that the contractual relation between Sutherland-as-North-American actor and his European directors took a sadomasochistic turn on a number of levels, economic, international, and erotic. On the economic level, Sutherland submits his bankable image to be exploited, so that American dollars will become available to cover Italian production costs. The European directors displace their sense of “prostituting” themselves onto Sutherland’s body: yes, they will agree to an American “star” so that their films will be commercially successful by American standards; but it’s not as if they are prostituting their art, since Sutherland will absorb the stigma of harlotry. Fellini’s contempt for the figure of Casanova, for instance, is equaled only by his disgust at having to chase after the American dollar. According to an account in the New York Times, Fellini only made the film, he says, “because I signed the contract. I read Casanova’s ‘Memoirs’ afterward and was smitten by a feeling of dizziness and the mortifying impression that I had made a wrong move” (Paul Schwartzman, “Fellini’s Unlovable Casanova,” 6 February 1977, 22–23). From the outset, in other words, Fellini presents the project almost as an accident that has befallen him, a mistake he has made and cannot get out of. In almost every interview, he stresses the arbitrariness, the perversity of his decision: “The producer wanted an American star at all costs, who would ensure the film was enough of a commercial success to at least pay for itself. He put forward the names of Robert Redford, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando” (Costantini 91). In the end, he says, he “gave the role to Donald Sutherland, a big spermfull waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator, as far removed as one could imagine from an adventurer and Don Juan–like Casanova, but a serious professional actor” (91).

DONALD SUTHERLAND

217

Fellini instructs Sutherland in the niceties of a scene in Fellini’s Casanova (Federico Fellini, Produzione Europee Associati/Universal, 1976). Personal collection of James Morrison.

Fellini’s comically unflattering characterizations of Sutherland’s physical appearance (with or without makeup) proved infectious, prompting critics of the film to join in with their own fanciful impressions: “The elaborate maquillage that Sutherland wears,” writes one critic, “the domed forehead, elongated nose, curves of curls at each side of the wig, makes his face a sort of spectral anamorph of male genitals. He thinks of himself as gentleman adventurer, so he metamorphoses into stylish cock-in-the-head” (Gay 18). Another calls Sutherland’s Casanova “a dummy with hardboiled eyes . . . quite as grotesque as the carnival of animalia that surrounds him” (Young 331). A third asks what prompted Fellini even to cast such a “lumpy eared, lazy-eyed, not-so-handsome Hollywood star” (Davis, “Casanova” 89). And another calls Sutherland’s Casanova “a bald, glabrous, waxen beanpole, covered with powder and oil, filthy and stinking” (Costantini 93). Thus, internationally, the European “auteur” will allow the American “star” to appear in his film, and there will be justice in the fact that America will be the object rather than the subject of exploitation for a change. In the process of creating this image, as though to displace the sense of

218

JEAN WALTON

“exploitation” from the director to the actor’s body, the European auteur will use that body as a site of degradation: in the case of 1900, Sutherland’s attempt to flesh out his fascist, to make it possible for spectators to see themselves in him, is flattened out by Bertolucci’s editing. And again, in the case of Casanova, Sutherland is forbidden to implement the knowledge he has gained reading Casanova’s autobiography; Fellini could not care less about Sutherland’s “idea” of Casanova. Indeed, Sutherland is told to keep his mouth closed through much of the shooting, ostensibly to facilitate a certain “line” of the profile, but no doubt also because the director just did not want his verbal input (Schar 309). Sutherland was to become the externalization of Fellini’s own “Casanova-asfascist within,” that which Fellini must corporealize in Sutherland’s body, in order to work out his antipathy towards it. For this operation to succeed, he and Sutherland had to cultivate diametrically opposed impressions of Casanova. While Fellini despises him, makes him into a “stronzo—a turd,” “a dissipated, melancholic, mechanical man,” “a puppet, a Pinocchio who never grew up” (Wiegand 151), Sutherland must love himself as Casanova, must believe himself to be a beautiful creature, despite all the humiliating abuse he will take, not only from his director, but also from all the critics. “Fellini detests him because he is a fool,” Sutherland remarks. “I feel for him because he is such a fool” (Schar 308). Consider this blow-by-blow description of their routine on the set: Sutherland, the consummate professional . . . was transformed into a visual image, an empty shell. He read his lines to Fellini and, with the camera running, was told where and how to move, how to turn his head, what to do with his hands. Fellini, standing beside the camera, acted out the grimaces and movements in tandem. Learning Fellini’s vocabulary of movements, Sutherland might flip his hand in anticipation of Fellini’s wishes. Not quite right, Fellini would take the actor’s hand in his own and move both. Sutherland had the strength to submit, and, gradually, rapport developed. Fellini would pace behind the camera, lost among the technicians, while Sutherland performed. Suddenly Fellini would pivot, there would be a flick of the wrist over the others’ heads—and, 20 feet away, Sutherland would respond subtly. (Schwartzman 28)

Fellini must be the dominator in the relationship, and Sutherland the submissive, the concubine, the passive marionette. “[Fellini] has a very particular idea in his mind,” says Sutherland, “and he doesn’t want to verbalize it or concretize it. . . . He just wants you to understand, and if you do, if you can, then he adds a little more to it. And it’s very lovely and very exciting” (Carol Caldwell, “The Quotable Donald Sutherland,” Esquire,

DONALD SUTHERLAND

219

March 1981, 52). He must submit to the makeup, the wig, the white silk corset and pantaloons he strips down to in every scene, and must love in a sensuous way the feel of all that maquillage and frippery. At times he comes across as a young Joan Crawford, head tipped upward toward a glamorous key-light, the semicircular eyebrows arched over the heavy lids, a tear glistening on the lower lashes. Is Sutherland ugly or is he beautiful as Casanova? That the critics could not agree was one indication of the bewitching gender ambiguity of his appearance. According to one observer, even Fellini himself was unsure: Fellini, who . . . had picked Sutherland for Casanova specifically to get away from the stereotype of the dark Latin lover, still appeared to have to fight off the seductiveness of his star’s personality. “I do not want to know too well Donald,” he told me. “I am too egotistical. I think only of my Casanova. I have only a vision of this Sooderland, this blue, innocent, baby eye, this cold fish, this strange. My Casanova!” (Grenier, “Looking for Mr. Goodstar?” 274–75)

It’s as though Fellini has to spirit himself away from the seductive presence of “Sooderland” the actor by forcing a shift, within one sentence, from the image of “this blue, innocent, baby eye” to that of “this cold fish, this strange” in order to arrive at his Casanova. To know Donald too well (or Donaldino as he calls him on the set) is to risk disrupting the contract they have entered into for the purpose of creating a certain filmed image, an image made up of Sutherland’s bewigged, painted, transmogrified face atop his simultaneously graceful and awkward, masculine and feminine body, in the act not only of seducing woman after woman but also of moving in loving response to the offscreen master who despises him. If Casanova labors pitifully to stay virile with his many bedfellows, Fellini must labor to maintain his dominance over a lovely being who threatens at any moment to soften his resolve. Sutherland’s self-confessed pleasure in this arrangement is consistent throughout his career. He calls himself “the most favored girl in [Fellini’s] harem” (Glenys Roberts, “Donald Sutherland: Devastating Eccentric,” Company, May 1979, 52), or Fellini’s “concubine,” his “courtesan,” remarking that “acting in that kind of situation gives me intense sensual pleasure. When you can satisfy it, time stops” (Mary Cantwell, “Donald Sutherland: Mesmerizer,” Vogue, January 1981, 146). It would seem that Sutherland was more receptive to the homoeroticism of this arrangement than Fellini was; indeed, Fellini cut from the film an enchanting scene in which Sutherland reclines in a gondola, a fountain plashing gently behind him, his face a subtle play of longing and expectancy as an African man in a turban leans

220

JEAN WALTON

in, ever so enticingly, for a kiss. Sutherland’s hooded eyes close in ecstasy as the sound track is suffused by the faint beating of a heart. That Sutherland thought of himself as playing Fellini as much as Casanova is hinted at by an interesting slip he made when stressing the exorbitance of the director’s attention to detail, even in this scene that was to be cut. “He had me wear a blue shirt,” Sutherland recalls in a filmed interview, “and the material cost $700—it was the most beautiful shirt. It was in a scene that was not used in the film; it was a scene where Fellini makes love with a man” (I’m a Born Liar [2002]). And when asked how erotic the film’s sex scenes were, Sutherland skipped over the many episodes with women that he had completed, in order to share his excitement over the sequence on the gondola: “Last night I kissed my first man. I have never had that experience before. And it was erotic. For me it was erotic” (Fred Robbins, “Donald Sutherland,” Oui, January 1977, 157). Elsewhere, when asked about the sartorial extravagance of his part, he replied: Very few men have much sense of style. And they’re—when they do, often they’re gay. The only kind of gay people I find attractive are those bordering on the transvestite. I loved to go to the studio. I would dress up and wait for Fellini to come and take me away. I knew always that I was the best lover he had. That I would be able to walk on quietly, silently, and he would see me out of the corner of his eye. That he would feel something—a little rush of something. I don’t know whether Fellini loves actors or not. But he loved me. And it was—t’was all very caressing and very, very refined. All nitrous oxide. (Caldwell 52)

The pleasure in this fantasy comes from the disorientation brought about by its subjects’ instability. Sutherland finds attractive the sort of man who takes pleasure in dressing up so outrageously as to cross gender boundaries, making him a “transvestite.” At the same time what he loves is being that splendidly dressed up man who waits, passively, for Fellini to come and take him away. What’s exciting is the prospect that this director who has expressed nothing but contempt for him, referred to him in nothing but abusive and denigrating terms (a “sperm-full waxwork,” “a stronzo— a turd”), will nevertheless catch a glimpse of him, and be made to feel “a little rush of something” in spite of himself. The reference to nitrous oxide, often used recreationally in conjunction with amyl nitrite to enhance euphoric sensations, puts us even more squarely into the pop culture world of queer sexual pleasures. As the decade wore on, a new term crept into Sutherland’s vocabulary: while he still called himself the director’s “concubine” or “lover,” he would now remark that “Acting is like being a really good butler. You aim

DONALD SUTHERLAND

221

to please” (Cantwell 146). But he is thinking of a very specific cinematic butler here: You know what I would really like to have been? Not an actor, but a butler. I’ve thought about it a lot. And I know I’d have been good at it. . . . Running a household, looking after the details, would give me great satisfaction. Also, I’d enjoy the power. Remember Joe Losey’s film, “The Servant,” in which Dirk Bogarde as the butler wound up taking over the house? Marvelous stuff. (Roderick Mann, “The Master of Elusion,” The Record, 24 June 1979, D17)

This peculiar fantasy of household servility perhaps augurs the redomestication of Sutherland at the end of the decade. But it also adds a fascinating twist to the way he had been working out his relation to directors. For it should be noted that much as he expressed enthusiasm for his role as an actor, he also aspired to direct: “The desire within me to direct a movie is so heavy, I can taste it,” he remarked in 1976 (Jeffrey Lyons, “An Actor with Motivation,” Model’s Circle, January 1976, 66). And although a few projects came close (as with Executive Action, a JFK assassination conspiracy movie that was ultimately directed by David Miller in 1973), he never managed to fulfill this ambition. Thus, by the early eighties he was saying things like, “watching [Robert] Redford work and looking at the results and seeing how extraordinarily difficult it is to do what he did, I realized that it will be a long time before I try it” (Dreifus, “Giraffe” 70). The whimsy of being the actor/butler who, through meticulous attention to the desire of his director/master, wields a kind of submissive control over him offers perhaps a kind of compensatory fantasy for his own unrealized dream of directing.

✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★✩ ★

Ordinary

Sutherland’s return to North America in the late seventies was marked by a series of roles that either played on his earlier “oddball” reputation (as with his appearance as the pot-smoking professor in the gross-out cult hit Animal House [1978] or his pratfall in Kentucky Fried Movie [1977]), or decked him out in conventional period costume (as in Murder by Decree [1979] and The First Great Train Robbery [1979]), or reprised his function in Don’t Look Now as the rational investigator in the face of supernatural disturbances (as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Though he continued to speak out on political issues, the impact of his politics on film seemed limited to efforts to boost the Canadian film industry. Interestingly, if he counted as an American commodity in Europe (when it came to securing U.S. financing for Italian films, for instance), it

222

JEAN WALTON

was suddenly Sutherland’s Canadian birthright that could be deployed when seeking the newly instituted Canadian tax break offered to projects that could be “certified” as Canadian. Certification could be obtained by earning credits for employing a Canadian director, writer, or actor, for so many “points” per Canuck, and by meeting a requirement that seventy-five percent of the film’s budget be spent in Canada (“Canada’s tax-inspired movies,” Business Week, 27 August 1979, 95). Sadly, this policy often resulted in “deal”-driven projects that put Canadian taxpayers’ dollars in the pockets of unscrupulous producers or brokers for movies that never even made it to the theaters, or that, if they did, played it safe by obscuring their Canadian associations (such as the London-set Murder by Decree, for instance). But long before the new tax law was instituted, Sutherland had regularly returned to Canada to lend his star status to Canadian projects that he thought had merit. Moreover, for the most part, he made a point of choosing film properties that were not only set north of the border, but also portrayed some aspect of Canadian culture, politics, or history that audiences might not otherwise know about, as with Alien Thunder (1974), a dramatization of a conflict between the RCMP and the Cree Indians set in rural Saskatchewan shortly after the Louis Riel rebellion; or his moving portrayal of Norman Bethune in a biopic that brought this pioneering Canadian doctor’s involvement in the Chinese revolution to Canadian television audiences. Perhaps only Canadians can fully appreciate that at least four of his films showcase Canadian cities without disguising them as anonymous metropolitan space, as in the snowy Montreal of An Act of the Heart, The Disappearance (1977), and Claude Chabrol’s Les Liens de sang (1978), or the rainy Vancouver, with its newly renovated Gastown district, of A Man, a Woman, and a Bank. However, it was not in Canada that Sutherland was to make his big “comeback” for American fans, but in Chicago, with a return to a quintessentially American melodrama, led by first-time director Robert Redford. Ordinary People was, predictably, touted as the vehicle that brought Sutherland back into the comfort zone of the ordinary. It seemed that Sutherland was already on the lookout for the role that would domesticate him for broad American audiences, and was perhaps anticipating his work in Redford’s film when he remarked in a 1979 profile (titled “No More Goofy Roles”) that he “didn’t know people had that image of me as a stoned-out freak. . . . Now, I would like to be ordinary for a while. I want to play straight parts, but roles that have some sense of humor” (Jordan Young, New York Times, 23 September 1979, D19). Significantly, he uses the term “straight” no less than five times in this interview, noting for instance that

DONALD SUTHERLAND

223

“Straight”: Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, Solofilm/United Artists, 1978). Personal collection of James Morrison.

Mathew Bennell in Body Snatchers was “a lot like me. The character was straight on what I thought, straight on rationality, straight on observing people in crisis situations.” Admittedly, Sutherland is using the term “straight” to stress the closeness of the character to his own personality, but the resonance of the adjective as a distancing term from sexual “deviance” can’t be overlooked. It was as though Sutherland had to capitulate to critics’ insistence on a repudiation or trivialization of his past excesses in order to be embraced once again by a broad box-office constituency: the “old” Sutherland was now dismissed as a “a long-haired, bearded, laid-back goofball” (Jordan Young, D19), a “flake” playing “whacked-out characters in freaked-out films” or a “nervy renegade.” In some cases, it was not so much his weirdness he needed to disown as his political outspokenness: “The political rhetoric he spouted during the Seventies has disappeared along with his beard,” we are told in a GQ article titled “Cleaning Up His Act.” “Today, during his segment on a local TV talk show, Sutherland speaks passionately not about government but about baseball’s Montreal Expos” (Scott Haller, March 1981, 208). But the surge of attention he received from mainstream magazines after the success of Ordinary People plumbed every aspect of his career over the

224

JEAN WALTON

previous decade, and while there were occasional efforts to prod him back into line, for the most part the radical politics, the malleable face, the casual bearing, the mix of dependability and goofiness, even his enthusiasm for submissiveness came across as essential components of what made him a particularly appealing leading man for the eighties, especially to women. Titles like “Mesmerizer” (Vogue), “A Face to Lead the Way” (Maclean’s), “A Far From Ordinary Man” (Cosmo), “The Beautiful Giraffe” (Mademoiselle), “The Quotable Donald Sutherland” (Esquire) led to in-depth profiles that covered, as his Playboy caption put it, “childhood traumas, sexuality, radical politics and strange roles” (Dreifus, “Sutherland” 73). Sutherland’s final scene with Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People can be read as a melancholic transformation of the signature “Sutherland bellow” that had accented his performances throughout the decade. In film after film, it seemed as though the cinematic apparatus was designed to wring from the Sutherland body nothing less than the involuntary and inarticulate howl more conventionally reserved for the female voice in movies. He rehearses a silent version of it in Alex in Wonderland during the Vietnam-on-Hollywood-Boulevard fantasy sequence where he kneels over three body bags—his wife and daughters, casualties of the mayhem that surrounds him and drowns out his open-mouthed wail of anguish. Leaning from the open window of a locomotive pulling dead soldiers to the afterworld, his white robes and gold-tinged hair floating in the dark night wind, Sutherland’s devastated Christ in Johnny Got His Gun lets out a long, resonant howl as though the sorrows of the world can no longer be expressed through language, but must pour uncontrollably from his overly sensitive body. In Don’t Look Now, he resurfaces from his panicked plunge into a pond, carrying his drowned daughter in her red Macintosh as the filming slows down to capture his long, drawn-out wail of horror and grief. Similar bellows mark devastating turning points in Alien Thunder and The Day of the Locust. In 1900, The Eagle Has Landed, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the howl seems beyond human, linking him with filthy swine in Bertolucci’s film, or becoming a haunting whistle that charms dogs in Eagle and, most memorably, emerging as an unearthly combination of hog squeals and the whine of a drill as he reveals himself to have become one of the aliens at the end of Body Snatchers. By 1980, when utopianism seems entirely out of the question, when Marxism and the “movement” find almost no public forum at all, when only wan liberalism counters the conservative return to family values that seems to have swept the nation, when everyone seems to have succumbed to pod conformity, the Sutherland howl is nowhere to be found, or at least,

DONALD SUTHERLAND

225

not in its raw, gut-wrenching rendition. Instead, we descend the staircase with Mary Tyler Moore in the middle of the night to find Sutherland hunched over the dining room table, silently sniffling. The tears already drying on his cheeks, his voice trembling, he tells her he doesn’t think he loves her anymore—and doesn’t know what he’ll do without that. In the original version of this scene, Sutherland sobbed throughout the delivery of his anguished speech. But sometime after shooting had wrapped, and despite the fact that Moore was no longer available, he broke his rule about submitting to the director’s wishes, and asked to film the scene again. Why? “I wanted [the character] to be calmer, less hysterical,” he remembers (Dreifus, “Sutherland” 90). So they re-created the set, with Redford reciting Moore’s lines off-camera, and Sutherland delivering his in the aftermath of his emotional upheaval. The time for the hysterical man had passed, perhaps, in this ominous world of the oncoming eighties. The Sutherland bellow was to be replaced by quiet restraint as he surveyed the wreckage and mourned the loss of the revolution.

★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩

In the Wings JAMES MORRISON

Among the women cited as rising stars at the end of the seventies by Facts on File, the New York–based research publisher, were Brooke Adams, Ronee Blakley, Melinda Dillon, Carrie Fisher, Karen Lynn Gorney, Margaux Hemingway, Amy Irving, and Talia Shire (Sternberg 65). That none of these performers went on to achieve full-fledged stardom suggests, among other things, the schism between the seventies and the eighties in Hollywood. By 1980, the New Hollywood was a thing of the now-distant past, and while most of the nontraditional stars who emerged from it maintained their careers into the next decade, a process of normalization in the production of star images accompanied the full reversion to the “blockbuster” mode of filmmaking in the Reagan era. The redefinitions of masculinity brought about in the seventies by figures ranging from Allen and Hoffman to Pacino and even, in their way, Redford and Beatty gave way to a hyper-masculine “hardbody” ethos in the eighties—often read as a repudiation of seventies-style male “sensitivity” (see Jeffords). Meanwhile, the feminist concerns that infused many mainstream films of the seventies lapsed considerably in the next decade, perhaps in response to the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment early in Reagan’s administration. Some stars were casualties of these trends. For example, the role that made Jill Clayburgh a major star after nearly a decade in the industry, An Unmarried Woman (1977), associated her closely with a feminist stance, and she appeared in three more films with explicit feminist overtones, It’s My Turn (1980), First Monday in October (1981), and I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982), but as Hollywood lost interest in feminism, Clayburgh was increasingly marginalized in “character” parts. One quintessential seventies star who retained her position in the following decade was Diane Keaton. Debuting in Lovers and Other Strangers in 1970 and achieving a rising profile in the Godfather films, Keaton was known as Woody Allen’s sidekick for most of the decade until the role that showcased her as a powerful talent in her own right in Annie Hall (1977). For that per226

IN THE WINGS

227

formance, she won the Academy Award for best actress and received a wealth of publicity in the last years of the decade. Nearly every article about her in the popular press notes her eccentric mannerisms and her personal resemblance to the ditzy but endearing character who launched her into the top echelon of stardom. What enabled Keaton’s smooth transition into the next decade, however, was an increasing sense of stability and control underlying the quirkiness. In an interview with Rex Reed immediately after Annie Hall was released and soon before Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) came out, Reed predictably emphasizes her eccentricity in describing her as a “Chaplinesque creature” in “baggy pants,” noting how “darling Diane clutters her conversation in a confusion of interrupted thoughts” (Reed 211–12), just like Annie Hall. A Time cover story around the same time describes her as “a shy, gangly, lost-and-found soul” (“Love, Death, and LaDe-Dah,” 26 September 1977, 68). After the release of Goodbar, however, the terms change. Interviewers continue to remark her apparent quirkiness, but now observe the gravity beneath this surface. “Diane Keaton, for all the ‘You know?’’s and ‘Well’’s, is no foolish bird,” notes Penelope Gilliatt in a New Yorker profile of the next year (“Her Own Best Disputant,” 25 January 1978, 43). Nearly thirty years later, in a New York Times Magazine article on Keaton, Daphne Merkin calls her “the American film actress most in control of her own narrative” (23 October 2005, 46). In order to gain such control and remain a star in the eighties, Keaton had to establish her independence from Allen. Looking for Mr. Goodbar was the first crucial role to that end, with Keaton as a seemingly respectable teacher who prowls clubs by night in search of anonymous sex. In past dramatic roles, as in the Godfather films, she had displayed a certain overearnestness, in contrast to the bubbly, flaky yet loveable persona of her films with Allen. But Goodbar demonstrated that the charisma of her comic persona could be transplanted into a dramatic context. Allen did his own part in securing Keaton’s independence, casting her in a dramatic role in Interiors in which not only does she not appear opposite him as a “straight” foil, but he does not appear in the film at all. Her films of the eighties are often allegories of a woman’s quest for independence, though typically with feminist undertones neutralized, including Reds (1981), The Little Drummer Girl (1984), and Baby Boom (1987). She appears, very briefly, in only one Allen film of the decade—Radio Days (1987)—solidifying the sense of independence that secured her continuing stardom. Meryl Streep’s roles of the seventies were all supporting parts, including one that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, The Deer Hunter (1978), and one for which she won the award in

228

JAMES MORRISON

that category, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Like many seventies stars, Streep eschewed conventional glamour, derided the vagaries of fame, and emphasized her commitment to theater. Typically, interviews highlight her versatility while she herself places an unusual emphasis on formal elements of craft (Patricia Goldstone, “On the Brink,” New York Times, 10 December 1978, 21). A profile by Janet Maslin in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner is the first to emphasize her vocal mastery, noting that her Louisiana accent in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) was modeled on Dinah Shore’s speech. This attention to Streep’s work with accents became especially pronounced in the eighties, initially suggesting a fetishism of technique at the expense of depth or warmth, a quality of coldness and impersonality. Except for her appearance in The Deer Hunter, all her seventies film roles are relatively unsympathetic characters, and she continued at the start of the next decade to play women who were elusive or mysteriously “foreign,” as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) or Still of the Night (1982). In discussing Kramer vs. Kramer in an interview with Cue, she noted the “challenge” of regaining sympathy for a character who walks out on her family at the beginning of the film (Corby Kummer, “Streep vs. Streep,” February 1980, 36), and her work thereafter increasingly focused on revealing a “human” dimension beneath an enigmatic surface, most dramatically in Sophie’s Choice (1982), which climaxes with the revelation of a past trauma that retrospectively “explains” the character’s erratic behavior. Another key role was Silkwood (1983), with Streep as a willful yet earthy character risking her job and her life to expose the criminal activity of a major corporation. That the remote-seeming Streep would become increasingly humanized was portended by the headline on the cover of Cue, which declared Streep an “Actress for the 80s.” Debra Winger was another emerging star whose transition from decade to decade suggests the trends of the time. By the end of the seventies, she had appeared in only two small-profile films, Thank God It’s Friday (1978) and French Postcards (1979), becoming a bona fide star in 1980 with Urban Cowboy. From a spirit of rebellion much remarked early in her career—and a holdover from the lingering New Hollywood ethos—she moved into roles that increasingly highlighted domesticity, if preserving a temperamental edge, from Terms of Endearment (1983) to Shadowlands (1993), in both of which she plays beloved characters dying of terminal illness. Publicity continued to focus on Winger’s impulsiveness and her tendency to extreme behavior, as when she walked out in the middle of a business meeting and cut off her hair before returning (David Ansen, “Life on the Highwire,” Newsweek, 21 November 1983, 92). Yet this aura of dan-

IN THE WINGS

229

ger, further marked in the subtitle of a paperback star bio in 1984, “Hollywood’s Wild Child,” gave way to her embodiment of more traditionally melodramatic or romantic characters, while her withdrawal from the industry for several years after 1995 was widely seen as a bitter comment on Hollywood’s marginalization or domestication of strong women, as chronicled in Rosanna Arquette’s documentary film, Searching for Debra Winger (2002). Winger’s costar in Urban Cowboy, John Travolta, is an example of a figure who achieved major stardom at the end of the seventies but did not sustain this level of popularity in the eighties, despite major adjustments to his star persona to adapt to circumstances of the new decade. Saturday Night Fever made Travolta an icon of the disco era, prompting young men across the country to imitate his styles of dress and behavior to an extent unseen since the days of James Dean or Elvis Presley (“Roger Blaha Has the Fever,” People, 24 April 1978, 32). His role in Grease (1978) the following year reinforced this success and showed a musical versatility that would enable him to outlast the quick demise of disco. In Grease, Travolta manages simultaneously to be a romantic heartthrob and a comic dancer in the league of Ray Bolger or Donald O’Connor. Both these roles depend on a stylization of the body that amplifies “masculine” postures and parodies them at the same time. Though Travolta represents a return to a more traditional masculinity than that embodied by figures such as Allen or Hoffman, it has a camp overtone in both these films (though much less so in Urban Cowboy), and Travolta’s expressions of comfort with gay fandom mark him as a type of the post-Stonewall male star. As he remarked about his “sex appeal” in a Playboy interview, “If I have that effect on everyone—homosexual, heterosexual, whatever—then why be discriminating?” (Judson Klinger, “John Travolta,” December 1978, 105). Profiles of Travolta in the seventies rarely fail to note his physical preparations for his roles. In a Los Angeles Times interview, Travolta makes much of having “worked five months getting in shape for the picture” (Kevin Thomas, “Travolta Puts Best Foot Forward for Disco Role,” 16 December 1977, IV:30). This might have made him a good fit for the rise of “body culture” in male stardom of the eighties, and two of his key roles in the decade, Stayin’ Alive (1983) and Perfect (1985), seem to promote that possibility. In the Reagan era, however, bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone appeared as action heroes, with their “hardbodies” proposed almost entirely as instruments of power or domination. Travolta’s sleekly muscled physique in Stayin’ Alive, the miscalculated sequel to Saturday Night Fever that was a major box-office failure, seemed to exist for its

230

JAMES MORRISON

own sake, with associations of feyness and narcissism, and with the emphasis on aesthetic display rather than the body’s use in action, even though, strangely enough, Stallone directed the film. By 1994, Travolta’s role in Pulp Fiction was deemed a “comeback” from his declining fortunes of the eighties, and the display of his notably untoned body in that film marked the contrast sharply. Only after this quick move from callowness to seediness did Travolta achieve some of the status as an action star that eluded him in the eighties. Richard Gere began his career in tandem with Travolta. Indeed, they were the two finalists for the role in Days of Heaven (1978) that Gere eventually got, while in 1973 Gere originated on the London stage the role of Danny Zucco that Travolta eventually played in the film version of Grease. Like Travolta, Gere was a star who marked a return to a more traditional masculinity than had prevailed for much of the seventies, but who remained distinct from the eighties “hardbody” model. Going further than Travolta’s equanimity about his gay fans, Gere played to a gay fan base by, for instance, posing shirtless for the cover of After Dark, an entertainment magazine with a largely gay male readership for which Gere also did an interview. In 1980, he appeared on Broadway as a homosexual inmate in a Nazi concentration camp in the play Bent, and in the same year he starred in American Gigolo, a film with a complex combination of queer and homophobic energies. Also like Travolta, however, Gere distanced himself from gay male culture throughout the eighties, and in 1994, three years after his marriage to “supermodel” Cindy Crawford, the couple took out a full-page ad in the London Times declaring, “We are heterosexual and monogamous and take our commitment to each other very seriously” (Karen S. Schneider, “Two for the Road,” 19 December 1994). Following the model of seventies stardom, Gere stressed the seriousness of his artistry in interviews. He played Hamlet onstage in Los Angeles in 1979 and repeatedly remarked on his own aspirations to versatility, an emphasis linked to his professed disdain for celebrity culture. “I refuse to be the flavor of the month,” he asserted early in his career (Roderick Mann, “From the Notebooks,” Los Angeles Times, 20 February 1978, IV:7–8). This comment, repeated in the After Dark profile and many others, was often turned against Gere as evidence of pretentiousness. Yet Gere staunchly continued to proclaim his ambition to avoid typecasting: “I’m trying to be different in each of my films,” he remarked to Rona Barrett’s Gossip (November 1979, n. p.). Even so, associations with current and former stars persisted, often flatteringly, as when After Dark predicts that “he

IN THE WINGS

231

has the potential of shooting up there with De Niro, Pacino, and Travolta” (Harvey Elliott, “Forward Gere,” September 1978, 39). Elsewhere, such comparisons were made at his expense. Though his star continued to rise in the eighties, critics frequently viewed him as an ersatz figure, a degraded version of earlier stars like Dean, Brando, or De Niro. Reviewing Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Pauline Kael remarked that he “looks like Robert De Niro without the mole on his cheek, but there’s more than that missing” (When the Lights Go Down 319). For Kael, Gere’s performances were “a soap opera actor’s impersonation of De Niro” (319), in an “imitative style” (447): He “does not seem to have enough resources of his own to draw upon,” she writes of his later performance in Bloodbrothers (1978), so “he dips into the performances of actors he admires—De Niro and Brando, mostly” (447). The notion of the artificial star based on a pastiche of other celebrity figures was on the rise by the eighties. Christopher Reeve, whose career actually did begin in soap operas, was a key example, described as the “Special Effects Superman” in the title of an article in Cue (Daphne Davis, 8 December 1978, 24). During interviews in the seventies, Reeve largely refuses to discuss his soap opera career, also countering the attribution of falseness, as he tries to reassert his acting chops—seventies-style—and his authenticity as a performer. This insistence on authenticity took on new ramifications after a horseback riding accident in 1995 severed Reeve’s spinal cord; if the reality of his stunts in the Superman role was an object of discussion in relation to his early films, his appearances as a paralytic afterward—perhaps most tellingly in a 1998 television remake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window—silenced further critical debate about the authenticity of his onscreen presence. With a bristlier interview persona than any star to emerge in the eighties, Reeve constantly emphasizes his artistic seriousness and his distance from the role of Superman: “It’s in my contract” that he will never appear as Superman off the set, he says in the Cue interview (24). Noting that the filmmakers auditioned athletes for the role, Reeve scoffs, “[T]he producers’ view seemed to be that they didn’t need an actor,” and goes on to insist that it is his acting ability, not technical trickery, that creates the requisite suspension of disbelief for the audience’s acceptance of the film’s illusion (Roderick Mann, “‘Superman’ Reeve a Born Flier,” Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1978, 35). In keeping with the rebelliousness of seventies stars, Reeve makes clear that he does not intend to build a career on the Superman character: “The way I see it, I don’t have an agreement beyond the first two films,” he insists (35). In fact, however, he appeared in all four

232

JAMES MORRISON

films of the cycle, accounting for much of his work in the eighties—and belying the narrative of stars’ autonomy in the age of package deals and agents’ powers. Bridging a gap between stars like Travolta and Gere and the “hardbody” action stars of the eighties, Reeve’s career also traversed the divide between the renewed “authenticity” of the seventies and the aesthetic of pastiche and a revelry in artificial surfaces that would increasingly reign in the subsequent decade.

WO R K S C I T E D

★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩

Fan magazines and other primary or archival materials are cited in the text of individual essays. Adair, Gilbert. Vietnam on Film: From The Green Berets to Apocalypse Now. New York: Proteus, 1981. Amburn, Ellis. The Sexiest Man Alive: A Biography of Warren Beatty. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. Anderegg, Michael. “Hollywood and Vietnam: Jane Fonda and John Wayne as Discourse.” Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Ed. Michael Anderegg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. 15–32. Andersen, Christopher. Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990. Babuscio, Jack. “Camp and the Gay Sensibility.” Queer Cinema: The Film Reader. Ed. Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2004. 121–36. Bachmann, Gideon. “Films Are Animal Events: Bernardo Bertolucci Talks about His New Film, ‘1900.’” Film Quarterly, 29:1 (Autumn 1975), 11–19. Bartov, Omer. The “Jew” in Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Baumgarten, Paul A., and Morton L. Leavy. Legal and Business Problems of Financing Motion Pictures. New York: Practising Law Institute, 1979. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. 252–79. Blum, John Morton. Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961–1974. New York: Norton, 1991. Bobo, Jacqueline. “‘The Subject Is Money’: Reconsidering the Black Film Audience as Theoretical Paradigm.” Black American Literature Forum 25:2 (Summer 1991), 421–32. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 4th ed. New York: Continuum, 2002. Boyd, Todd. The Notorious Ph.D.’s Guide to the Superfly ’70s: A Connoisseur’s Journey Through the Fabulous Flix, Hip Sounds, and Cool Vibes that Defined a Decade. New York: Harlem Moon, 2007. Braidotti, Rosi. “Woman.” The Deleuze Dictionary. Ed. Adrian Parr. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Brenner, Marie. “Collision on Rainbow Road.” New Times (24 January 1975), 48–55. Briggs, Joe Bob. “Who Dat Man?: ’Shaft‘ and the Blaxploitation Genre.” Cineaste 28.2 (2003), 27–29. Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946–Present. 5th ed. New York: Ballantine: 1992. Callan, Michael Feeney. Julie Christie. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Carroll, Peter. It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. Clark, Danae. Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 233

234

WORKS CITED

Coles, Robert. Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear. Vol. 1. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. Connell, John. “Reel 3 Interviews . . . Joel Freeman.” Reel 3 (1971), 10–13. Cook, David A. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979. New York: Scribner’s, 2000. Costantini, Costanzo. Conversations with Fellini. Trans. Sohrab Sorooshian. New York: Harcourt, 1997. Covey, William. “The Genre Don’t Know Where It Came From: African American Neo-Noir Since the 1960s.” Journal of Film and Television 55:2/3 (Summer 2003), 59–72. Craven, Jenny. “Subjectivity.” Films and Filming 24 (June 1978), 18–24. DeAngelis, Michael. “Movies and Confession.” American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations. Ed. Lester Friedman. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image [1983]. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985]. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Desser, David, and Lester D. Friedman. American Jewish Filmmakers, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Diawara, Manthia. “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance.” Black American Cinema. Ed. Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993. 211–20. Dunaway, Faye, and Betsy Sharkey. Looking for Gatsby: My Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Dyer, Richard. “Don’t Look Now: The Male Pinup.” Screen 23:3–4 (September/October 1982), 61–73. ———. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. Stars [1979], new ed. London: BFI, 1998. Fonda, Jane. My Life So Far. New York: Random House, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. French, Michael. U.S. Economic History Since 1945. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1997. García Espinosa, Julio. “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema. Ed. Michael Chanan. London: BFI, 1983. 28–33. ———. “Meditations on Imperfect Cinema . . . Fifteen Years Later.” New Latin American Cinema: Volume 1: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations. Ed. Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. 83–85. Gay, Clifford. “Casanova.” Framework 7/8 (1 March 1978), 17–19. Gerstner, Richard, ed. International Motion Picture Almanac, 1979. New York: Quigley Publications, 1979. Gledhill, Christine. “Klute 2: Feminism and Klute.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 1980. 112–28. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Gornick, Vivian. “The FTA’s Asian Tour (1): ‘I Don’t Want Anyone over Me, I Don’t Need Anyone Under Me’” The Village Voice (30 March 1972), 6, 8, 34–36, 38. ———. “The FTA’s Asian Tour (2): Half Farce, Half Morality Play.” The Village Voice (6 April 1972), 20–22.

WORKS CITED

235

———. “The FTA’s Asian Tour (3): ‘Bob Hope Is Not the Enemy.’” The Village Voice (13 April 1972), 17–18. Griffin, Nancy, and Kim Masters. Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New York: Penguin, 2008. Hayward, Anthony. Julie Christie. London: Robert Hale, 2000. Hellman, Lillian. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Hoberman, J., and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Midnight Movies. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Hodgson, Godfrey. America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon, What Happened and Why. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Hollinger, Karen. The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star. New York: Routledge, 2006. Horwath, Alexander. “The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967–1976.” The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. 9–17. Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. London: BFI, 1992. _______. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Jay, Bernard. Not Simply Divine: Beneath the Makeup, Above the Heels, and Behind the Scenes with a Cult Superstar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Kael, Pauline. For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies. New York: Plume Books, 1994. ———. Reeling. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. ———. When the Lights Go Down. New York: Henry Holt, 1980. Kennedy, Phillippa. Jodie Foster: A Life on Screen. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1996. Kiernan, Thomas. Jane Fonda: A Heroine for Our Time. New York: Putnam’s, 1982. Kolbowski, Silvia. “Homeboy Cosmopolitan (interview with Manthia Diawara).” October 83 (Winter 1988), 51–71. Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kovic, Ron. Born on the Fourth of July. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Krämer, Peter. “When ‘Hanoi Jane’ Conquered Hollywood: Jane Fonda’s Films and Activism, 1977–81.” The New Film History. Ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 104–16. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Larkin, Alile Sharon. “Cinematic Genocide.” Black Camera: A Micro Journal of Black Film Studies 18:1 (2003), 3–4.

236

WORKS CITED

Leab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and William Schneider. The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind. New York: The Free Press, 1983. Litwak, Mark. Reel Power: The Struggle for Influence and Success in the New Hollywood. New York: Plume, 1987. Lucas, Anthony. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Lyne, William. “No Accident: From Black Power to Black Box Office.” African American Review 34:1 (2000), 39–59. Margolin, C. K. “Salvation versus Liberation: The Movement for Children’s Rights in a Historical Context.” Social Problems 25:4 (April 1978), 44–52. McDonald, Paul. The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflower Press, 2000. Meyer, Richard. “Rock Hudson’s Body.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1992. 259–88. Moon, Michael, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, and a Little-Understood Emotion.” Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBresco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 292–328. Morin, Edgar. The Stars. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989. Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Neale, Steve. “Art Cinema as Institution.” Screen 22:1 (1981), 11–39. O’Connor, James. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973. Offe, Claus. Contradictions of the Welfare State. Ed. John Keane. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984. Patterson, James T. The Oxford History of the United States. Vol. 10, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. _______. The Oxford History of the United States., Vol. 11, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Perkins, Tessa. “The Politics of ‘Jane Fonda.’” Stardom: Industry of Desire. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: Routledge, 1991. 237–50. Pomerance, Murray. “The Man-Boys of Steven Spielberg.” Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth. Ed. Murray Pomerance and Frances K. Gateward. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 133–54. Pym, John, ed. Time Out Film Guide. 14th ed. London: Time Out Group Ltd., 2005. Quirk, Lawrence, and William Schoell. The Sundance Kid: An Unauthorized Biography of Robert Redford. London: Taylor, 2006. Redgrave, Vanessa. Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1994. Reed, Rex. Travolta to Keaton. New York: William Morrow, 1979. Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Touchstone, 1970. Reid, Mark A. “The Black Action Film: The End of the Patiently Enduring Black Hero.” Film History 2 (1988), 23–36. ———. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Robertson, Patrick. Film Facts. New York: Billboard Books, 2001. Rodowick, D. N. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

WORKS CITED

237

Roof, Judith. All about Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Schar, Robert. “Donald Sutherland.” Cinema Papers (April 1977), 308–9. Schoell, William. The Films of Al Pacino. New York: Citadel Press, 1995. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Sheff, David. “Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.” Rolling Stone (5 November–10 December 1987), 123–28. Shields, Brooke. The Brooke Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Sims, Yvonne D. Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Smith, Jack. “Pink Flamingos.” The Village Voice Film Guide. Ed. Dennis Lim. New York: Wiley, 2006. 197–199. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Sørensen, Bent. “Sacred and Profane Icon-Work: Jane Fonda and Elvis Presley.” U.S. Icons and Iconicity. Ed. Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser, and Suzanne Rieser. Vienna: LIT, 2006. 237–59. Sternberg, Cobbett S. Film Facts. New York: Facts on File, 1980. Stevenson, Jack. Desperate Visions 1: Camp America: The Films of John Waters and George and Mike Kuchar. London: Creation Books, 1996. Studlar, Gaylyn. “Midnight S/excess: Cult Configurations of ‘Femininity’ and the Perverse.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 17:1 (Spring 1989), 2–14. Taubin, Amy. Taxi Driver. London: BFI, 2000. Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Waters, John. Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters. New York: Vintage, 1987. White, Patricia. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Wiegand, Christopher. Federico Fellini: Ringmaster of Dreams, 1920–1993. Cologne, Germany: Taschen Books, 2003. Williams, Harriet. “Education.” American Decades, 1970–1979. Ed. Victor Bondi. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. Williams, Linda. “Sex and Sensation.” The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey NowellSmith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 491–95. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond, Expanded and Revised Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Young, Vernon. “The Grotesque in Some Recent Films.” The Hudson Review 31:2 (Summer 1978), 329–36. Yule, Andrew. Life on the Wire: The Life and Art of Al Pacino. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991

CONTRIBUTORS ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩

CHRIS CAGLE teaches in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. His research interests include Classical Hollywood history, the sociology of taste, and documentary theory and pseudo-documentary. Recent essays have appeared in Screen and Scope. He is currently writing a book on the postwar Hollywood social problem film, provisionally entitled Liberal Hollywood: Social Problem Films and Postwar Transformation of an Industry.

is assistant professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. His current book project, The Desiring-Image, theorizes a model of queer cinema based on formal principles rather than identity politics, drawing heavily on Deleuzian philosophies of film and sexuality. He has published essays on Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, and explicit sex in commercial cinema, and he is the author of the film reviews at www.NicksFlickPicks.com.

NICK DAVIS

is an associate professor of English and Film Studies at Wayne State University. Her research interests include American film, media reception studies, and feminism and film. She is the author of Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture (1998), which was published in an updated second edition in 2009.

CYNTHIA ERB

is a professor of Literature and Film Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author, co-author, or editor of several books on film, most recently Roman Polanski (2007).

JAMES MORRISON

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE is a professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University. She teaches courses in film theory, experimental cinema, the horror film, and New Queer Cinema. Her recent books include Neil Jordan (2008) and Film: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, with Tom Wallis (2008).

is an assistant professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. He is writing a book that examines how the international success of Italian Neorealism endorsed the idea of a global humanist spectator after World War II, refashioning the practice and politics of filmgoing. He is also co-editing an anthology on the geopolitics of art cinema. He has published essays on international cinema, classical film theory, and the history of photography. KARL SCHOONOVER

239

240

CONTRIBUTORS

holds an MFA in film from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he is also completing a Ph.D. in Modern Studies. He is coauthor of The Films of Terrence Malick (2003).

THOMAS SCHUR

is a professor of English and literature at Utah Valley University. She is the author of Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Rereading Film Noir (2005) and Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir (1999). She is currently writing about the representation of jazz in film noir. JANS WAGER

is a professor of English, Film/Media, and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (2001), as well as articles in Critical Inquiry, Discourse, differences, New Orleans Review, Contemporary Literature, and College Literature. Her most recent projects include a study of peristaltic time in the body, and a novel set in Western Canada in the early 1970s. JEAN WALTON

is an assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His work has appeared in Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, and Queer TV (2009). His book American Macho is forthcoming.

JOE WLODARZ

I

N

D

E

X

★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩

Note: Featured stars in boldface; page numbers for illustrations in italic. Abel, Walter, 129 Accused, The (Jonathan Kaplan, 1988), 85 Act of the Heart (Paul Almond, 1970), 205, 208, 213 Adair, Gilbert, 33 Adams, Brooke, 226 After Dark (magazine), 230 Agatha (Michael Apted, 1979), 6–7, 195–197 Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970), 208, 224 Ali, Muhammed, 103 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), 85 Alice’s Restaurant (Arthur Penn, 1969), 4 Alien Thunder (Claude Fournier, 1974), 222, 224 All About Thelma and Eve (Judith Roof), 131–132 Allen, Karen, 79 Allen, Woody, 3, 7–10, 8, 64, 226, 229 All the King’s Men (Robert Rossen, 1949), 54–55 All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), 4, 43, 50, 57–58, 59, 97, 191 Altman, Robert, 189, 202, 212 American Film (magazine), 2 American Film Institute, 68 American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980), 80, 230 American Psychiatric Association (APA), 125 Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959), 117 Anderson, Jack, 22 . . . And Justice for All (Norman Jewison, 1979), 68–69 Andrews, Julie, 3, 187 Anger, Kenneth, 163–164 Animal House (John Landis, 1978), 221 Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), 7, 8, 9, 226–227 Arden, Eve, 132 Arnold (George Frenady, 1973), 129

Artaud, Antonin, 136 Astaire, Fred, 10 Astin, John, 88 Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007), 200 Auberjonois, Rene, 154 Aubrey, James, 105, 107 Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006), 201 Baad Asssss Cinema (Isaac Julien, 2002), 113–114 Babuscio, Jack, 128 Baby Boom (Charles Shyer, 1987), 227 Bacall, Lauren, 196 Badham, John, 61 Balcony, The (play, Jean Genet, 1957), 136 Balcony, The (Joseph Strick, 1963), 136 Bananas (Woody Allen, 1971), 7 Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968), 16 Bardot, Brigitte, 17 Barefoot in the Park (Gene Saks, 1967), 43 BarKays, The (music group), 104 Bartov, Omer, 9 Bazin, André, 176 Beaton, Cecil, 10 Beatty, Warren, 39, 39–60, 47, 187, 189, 192, 193, 226 Bellocq, Ernest, 90–93 Benjamin, Walter, 174–175 Bennett, Lerone, 112 Bent (play, Martin Sherman, 1979), 230 Bergman, Ingrid, 139, 196 Berlin, Brigid, 140 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 140, 179, 214–215, 218 Big Sleep, The (Howard Hawks, 1946), 105 Bisset, Jacqueline, 196 Black, John D., 103, 113 Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973), 104 Black Panthers, 24, 102, 113–114, 118–119 Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon), 110 241

242

INDEX

Black Star (magazine), 107 Black World (magazine), 107 Blair, Linda, 82 Blakley, Ronee, 226 Bloodbrothers (Robert Mulligan, 1978), 231 Bloody Chamber, The (Angela Carter), 134 Bloody Mama (Roger Corman, 1970), 121, 129 Blow Job (Andy Warhol, 1963), 164 Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), 194 Blue Gardenia, The (Fritz Lang, 1953), 104 Blue Lagoon, The (Randall Kleiser, 1980), 100 Blume in Love (Paul Mazursky, 1973), 121 Bobby Deerfield (Sydney Pollack, 1977), 66, 69 Bogart, Humphrey, 7, 105 Bolger, Ray, 229 Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), 4, 46 Boom! (Joseph Losey, 1968), 167 Boorstin, Daniel, 2 Born on the Fourth of July (Ron Kovic), 212 Bost, Lee, 103 Boyd, Todd, 102–103 Boys in the Band, The (William Friedkin, 1970) Braidotti, Rosi, 190–191 Brando, Marlon, 36, 70, 197, 216, 231 Brecht, Bertolt, 35, 165, 184, 196 Brice, Fanny, 11 Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005), 119 Bridges, Alan, 195 Bridge Too Far, A (Richard Attenborough, 1977), 43 Broderick, James, 76 Brooke Book, The (Brooke Shields), 90 Brown, Drew, 103 Brown, James, 104 Brown, Jerry, 29 Brown, Jim, 106, 119 Brown, Terry, 94 Brubaker (Stuart Rosenberg, 1980), 43 Bryant, Celia, 103 Bryant, Louise, 48 Bugsy Malone (Alan Parker, 1976), 94 Buñuel, Luis, 164 Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976), 129

Burstyn, Ellen, 85, 187 Burton, Richard, 129 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), 43, 46–47 Caan, James, 11–12, 33, 67 Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972), 13–14, 71 Cacoyannis, Michael, 195 California Suite (Herbert Ross, 1978), 35 Cambridge, Godfrey, 103 Cammell, Donald, 191 Campaign for Economic Progress (political organization), 19 Canby, Vincent, 80, 197 Candidate, The (Michael Ritchie, 1972), 43, 47, 49, 51, 54–55 Candleshoe (Norman Tokar, 1977), 87 Carradine, Keith, 90–91, 92 Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976), 129 Carson, Johnny, 122–123 Carter, Angela, 134 Carter, James, 88, 98 Carter, Terry, 106 Casey, Bernie, 106 Casino Royale (Val Guest, Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, and Richard Talmadge, 1967), 7 Cassavetes, John, 135 Cavani, Liliana, 179 Cavett, Dick, 12 Cazale, John, 73 Champ, The (Franco Zeffirelli, 1979), 140, 155–156 Chaplin, Charles, 180 Charge of the Light Brigade, The (Tony Richardson, 1968), 196 Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney, 1967), 13 Chase, The (Arthur Penn, 1966), 46 Chelminski, Rudolph, 106 Chelsea Girls (Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol, 1966), 163 Chicago Daily News (newspaper), 112 Chicago Sun Times (newspaper), 109 Chicago Today (newspaper), 108 Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 79 Chico Hamilton Quintet (music group), 104 Chien andalou, Un (Luis Buñuel, 1929), 164 Children of Crisis (Robert Coles), 83 China Syndrome, The (James Bridges, 1979), 18, 29, 30, 31–35, 37, 186

INDEX

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), 143–147, 147, 155–156 Christie, Agatha, 7, 196–197 Christie, Julie, 46, 182, 182–194, 187, 190, 200–201 Cimino, Michael, 65 Cioffi, Charles, 27, 113 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 131 Clark, Danae, 200 Clayburgh, Jill, 226 Cleaver, Eldridge, 118 Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, 1973), 106, 121, 126–128, 127, 129 Clift, Montgomery, 135 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), 82 Clover, Carol, 28 Cole, Nat “King,” 104 Coles, Robert, 83 Collier, Peter, 26, 31 Comes a Horseman (Alan J. Pakula, 1978), 33, 34, 35–36 Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978), 18, 29, 31, 33, 35–36 Company of Wolves, The (Neil Jordan, 1984), 134 Conformist, The (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), 179 Connery, Sean, 3, 196 Conversation, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), 97, 191 Cook, Bruce, 2–3 Cook, David. A, 1, 4, 50 Coppola, Francis Ford, 62, 65, 67 Corliss, Richard, 42 Cosby, Bill, 107 Cosmopolitan (magazine), 6, 29 Cotton Comes to Harlem (Ossie Davis, 1970), 102–103 Country (Richard Pearce, 1984), 186 Covey, William, 104 Crawford, Cindy, 230 Crawford, Joan, 128, 132, 219 Crosby, Bing, 10 Crosby, Cathy Lee, 118 Crosse, Rupert, 106 Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980), 68–70 Cue (magazine), 29, 228, 231 Cukor, George, 10, 29 Cul-de-Sac (Roman Polanski, 1966), 167 Daily Telegraph (newspaper), 185 Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965), 184–186

243

Davis, Bette, 129, 132, 134, 165, 180 Davis, Ossie, 102–103, 113 Day of the Locust, The (Nathanael West), 214 Day of the Locust, The (John Schlesinger, 1975), 204, 214, 224 Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978), 83, 230 Dean, James, 36, 135, 229, 231 Decade Under the Influence, A (Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese, 2003), 191 Deer Hunter, The (Michael Cimino, 1978), 65, 227–228 Deleuze, Gilles, 184, 193, 199 Delon, Alain, 160 Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977), 190, 192–193 De Niro, Robert, 15, 62, 64–66, 68–69, 96, 97, 215, 231 Denver Post (newspaper), 24 DePalma, Brian, 63 Depardieu, Gérard, 215 Deren, Maya, 164 Desperate Living (John Waters, 1977), 164 Devane, William, 195 Devils, The (Ken Russell, 1971), 194, 201 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA), 125 Diane Linkletter Story, The (John Waters, 1970), 163 Diary of Anne Frank, The (George Stevens, 1959), 123 Diawara, Manthia, 103 Dickinson, Angie, 129 Dietrich, Marlene, 95, 138–139 Dillon, Melinda, 226 Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), 97, 127 Disappearance, The (Stuart Cooper, 1977), 222 Divine, 158, 158–181, 159, 169, 177 Dobson, Tamara, 126 Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? (play, Don Peterson, 1969), 65 Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), 62–63, 69–80, 80 $ [Dollars] (Richard Brooks, 1971), 46, 56–57 Doll’s House, A (Joseph Losey, 1973), 26 Donen, Stanley, 14–15 Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), 186–189, 191, 204–205, 212, 221, 224 Double Life, A (George Cukor, 1947), 123 Douglas, Melvyn, 135

244

INDEX

Douglas, Michael, 32 Douglas, Shirley, 207 Douglas, Tommy, 207 Dowd, Maureen, 69 Drabble, Margaret, 31 Dressed to Kill (Brian DePalma, 1980), 129 Dreyfuss, Richard, 3 Du Maurier, Daphne, 212 Dunaway, Faye, 138, 138–157, 141, 147, 154 Duncan, Donald, 26 Duncan, Isadora, 194 Durning, Charles, 74 Dyer, Richard, 14, 129 “Dynasty” (TV show), 130 Eagle Has Landed, The (John Sturges, 1976), 204–205, 214, 224 Eastman, Carole, 142 Eastwood, Clint, 3 Ebert, Roger, 109, 111 Ebony (magazine), 107, 112, 114 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), 166 Eisenhower, Dwight, 88 Eisenstein, Sergei, 184 Electric Horseman, The (Sydney Pollack, 1979), 18, 33–37, 43–44, 54 Elliott, David, 112 Empire Strikes Back, The (Irvin Kershner, 1980), 18 Entertainment Weekly (magazine), 95 Esquire (magazine), 65 Essence (magazine), 114 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982), 100 Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex*But Were Afraid to Ask (Woody Allen, 1972), 7 Executive Action (David Miller, 1973), 221 Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973), 82, 112 Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977), 129 Eyes of Laura Mars (Irvin Kershner, 1978), 151–155, 154 Face in the Crowd, A (Elia Kazan, 1957), 55 Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966), 185 Fallaci, Oriana, 25 “Family” (TV show), 83 Fanon, Frantz, 110

Fargas, Antonio, 93 Farnsworth, Richard, 35 Farrell, Henry, 130 Farrow, Mia, 13–14, 135 Fellini, Federico, 166, 214–220 Fellini’s Casanova (Federico Fellini, 1976), 214, 216–220, 217 Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974), 158–159, 159, 168–170 Fever, The (Carlo Gabriel Nero, 2004), 200 Film Culture (magazine), 163 Finch, Peter, 148 First Deadly Sin, The (Brian G. Hutton, 1980), 157 First Great Train Robbery, The (Michael Crichton, 1979), 221 First Monday in October (Ronald Neame, 1981), 226 Fisher, Carrie, 226 Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963), 163–164 Flesh (Andy Warhol, 1968), 140 Fonda, Henry, 16–17, 20, 24, 35–37, 121 Fonda, Jane, 3, 13, 16, 16–38, 22, 30, 34, 138, 183, 197–198, 198, 203, 205–206, 208–211, 209 Ford, John, 98 Fosse, Bob, 71 Foster, Jodie, 82, 82–89, 89, 92, 94–100, 97 Foucault, Michel, 83–84, 91 Foxx, Redd, 103 Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974), 106 Freaky Friday (Gary Nelson, 1976), 86–89, 89, 95 Freeman, Joel, 103, 105–106, 109–110 French Connection, The (William Friedkin, 1971), 7, 113 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (Karel Reisz, 1981), 228 French Postcards (Willard Huyck, 1979), 228 Freud, Sigmund, 91, 177, 212–213 Friedan, Betty, 24 Friedkin, William, 71, 79 Frogs (George McCowan, 1972), 129 F.T.A. (Francine Parker, 1972), 18, 26, 209–212 Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968), 11 Funny Lady (Herbert Ross, 1975), 11 Fun with Dick and Jane (Ted Kotcheff, 1977), 18, 29, 31, 35

INDEX

Gable, Clark, 14 Garbo, Greta, 138, 187 García Espinosa, Julio, 162–163, 166–167, 169–171, 173, 181 Gardner, Ava, 129 Gardner, Barbara Jean, 110 Gardner, Fred, 22, 26 Garland, Judy, 13–14, 129 Gentleman’s Quarterly (magazine), 69, 223 Gere, Richard, 230–232 Gielgud, John, 196 Gilbert, Bruce, 32 Gilliatt, Penelope, 227 Glen or Glenda (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1953), 164 Go-Between, The (Joseph Losey, 1970), 186–188 Godard, Jean-Luc, 25, 139–140, 164 “God Bless the Child” (song), 14 Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), 62–63, 66, 68, 72, 112, 226–227 Godfather, Part II, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), 62–63, 65–67, 226–227 Gold Diggers, The (Sally Potter, 1983), 194 Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), 124 Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 25 Gorney, Karen Lynn, 226 Gornick, Vivian, 211 Gospel According to St. Matthew, The (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964), 166 Gould, Elliot, 62, 64–65, 205 Graduate, The (Mike Nichols, 1967), 4, 6 Granger, Farley, 129 Grant, Lee, 150–151, 192 Grease (Randall Kleiser, 1978), 229–230 Great Gatsby, The (Jack Clayton, 1974), 43, 46, 57 Great Waldo Pepper, The (George Roy Hill, 1975), 43, 46 Great White Hope, The (play, Howard Sackler, 1967), 107 Greenspun, Roger, 51 Grier, Pam, 119 Griffin, Junius, 103 Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2007), 180 Guattari, Félix, 193, 199 Guerrero, Ed, 106, 109 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (Stanley Kramer, 1967), 102

245

Gunn, Moses, 103, 113 Gussow, Mel, 6 Haber, Joyce, 11 Habermas, Jürgen, 52 Hackman, Gene, 3, 6, 15, 62, 64, 69, 70, 71 Hairspray (stage adaptation, 2002), 180 Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), 28 Halston (Roy Halston Frowick), 152 Hamlet (William Shakespeare), 10, 230 Harris, Art, 32 Harris, Barbara, 86–87, 89 Harris, Leonard, 97 Harper’s (magazine), 49 Haskell, Molly, 83, 94 “Hawkins” (TV show), 117–118 Hawn, Goldie, 3, 56, 192 Hayden, Sterling, 66 Hayden, Tom,18–19, 21, 26, 28–29 Hayes, Isaac, 104, 112, 115–116 Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983), 194 Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty and Buck Henry, 1978), 42–43, 57, 191, 193–194 Hellman, Jerome, 29 Hellman, Lillian, 33, 37 Helms, Jesse, 100 Hemingway, Margaux, 226 Hemingway, Mariel, 83 Henry, Justin, 5 Hepburn, Katharine, 120, 187 Heston, Charlton, 121 High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973), 113 Hiller, Wendy, 196 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), 37 History of Sexuality, The (Michel Foucault), 83–84 Hitchcock, Alfred, 104 Hoberman, J., 65, 163–164 Hodgson, Geoffrey, 52, 54 Hoffman, Dustin, 3–7, 5, 62, 64, 66, 68–69, 72, 140, 226, 229 Holden, William, 148 Holiday, Billie, 14 Hollinger, Karen, 197 Hoover, J. Edgar, 22–23 Hope, Bob, 209 Hot Buttered Soul (music group), 104 Hot Rock, The (Peter Yates, 1972), 46, 49, 56–57

246

INDEX

Huston, John, 145 Hutton, Lauren, 112

Juliet of the Spirits (Federico Fellini, 1965), 166

I, a Woman, Part II (Mac Ahlberg, 1968), 167 Ichord, Richard, 23 I’m a Born Liar (Damian Pettigrew, 2002), 220 I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (Jack Hofsiss, 1982), 226 Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), 124 Indian Wants the Bronx, The (play, Israel Horovitz, 1968), 65 Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978), 7–10 In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967), 102 Introduction to the Enemy (Haskell Wexler, 1974), 18 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978), 205, 221, 223, 223–224 Irving, Amy, 226 It’s Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974), 28 It’s My Turn (Claudia Weill, 1980), 226

Kael, Pauline, 7–8, 51, 67, 185, 196, 231 Katz, Donald R., 36 Keaton, Diane, 3, 8, 48, 138, 226–227 Keitel, Harvey, 98 Keller, Marthe, 69 Kelly, Gene, 10 Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970), 202–204, 208 Kentucky Fried Movie, The (John Landis, 1977), 221 Kershner, Irvin, 152–153 Kiernan, Thomas, 29 King, Martin Luther Jr., 102 Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971), 18, 20–21, 24, 26–28, 33, 205, 208–209, 209, 213 Knoblauch, Mary, 108–109 “Kojak” (TV show), 118 Kovic, Ron, 211 Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), 4, 5, 228 Kristeva, Julia, 137 Kristofferson, Kris, 12, 85, 98 Kubrick, Stanley, 136 Kuchar Brothers (George and Mike), 163–164 Kya-Hill, Robert, 115

Jackson, Glenda, 183 Jackson, Samuel L., 112 Jacoby, Scott, 96 Jagger, Bianca, 152 Jameson, Fredric, 53–54, 58 Jarrott, Charles, 195 Jay, Bernard, 180 Jenkins, David, 185–186 Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney Pollack, 1972), 47, 51, 55 Jet (magazine), 107, 117 Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938), 36 J. Geils Band (music group), 156 Jodie: An Icon (Pratibha Parmar, 1996), 85, 94–95 John, Elton, 95 Johnny Got His Gun (novel, Dalton Trumbo), 211 Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo, 1971), 208, 213, 224 Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), 128 Johnson, Ellsworth, 104 Johnson, J. J., 104 Journey Back to Oz (Hal Sutherland, 1974), 13–14 Julia (Fred Zinnemann, 1977), 32–33, 35, 37, 195, 197–200, 198 Julien, Isaac, 113

Ladd, Diane, 85 Lady Eve, The (Preston Sturges, 1941), 36 Lady Ice (Tom Gries, 1973), 205 L.A. Free Press (newspaper), 24 Laird, Melvin, 17, 23 Lake, Veronica, 142 Lancaster, Burt, 113 Lane, Diane, 82 Lane, Mark, 26 Larkin, Alile Sharon, 111 Lasch, Christopher, 2 Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972), 179 Laurie, Piper, 129 Learning Tree, The (Gordon Parks, 1969), 103 Lee, Bruce, 4, 62 Lemmon, Jack, 3 Lenny (Bob Fosse, 1974), 4, 6 Lerner, Alan Jay, 10 Lester, Richard, 139 Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972), 25

INDEX

Lettieri, Al, 66 Lewis, Roger, 103 Liens de sang, Les (Claude Chabrol, 1978), 222 Life (magazine), 14, 32, 106, 123 Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), 4, 6 Little Drummer Girl, The (George Roy Hill, 1984), 227 Little Fauss and Big Halsy (Sidney J. Furie, 1970), 43, 112 Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The (Nicolas Gessner, 1976), 94–96 Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971), 208 Little Romance, A (George Roy Hill, 1979), 82 Lochary, David, 167–168 Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962), 136 Lombard, Carol, 14 Look (magazine), 5, 203 Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977), 227, 231 Los Angeles Herald Examiner (newspaper), 228 Los Angeles Times (newspaper), 11, 229 Losey, Gavrik, 7 Losey, Joseph, 7, 139, 187 Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975), 7 Lovers and Other Strangers (Cy Howard, 1970), 226 Lucky Lady (Stanley Donen, 1975), 13–15 Lugosi, Bela, 165 Lumet, Sidney, 62, 139 Lutter, Alfred, 85 Lyne, William, 113–114 Mademoiselle (magazine), 45 Magician of Lublin, The (Menahem Golan, 1979), 121 Mailer, Norman, 2, 205 Main Event, The (Howard Zieff, 1979), 13 Malle, Louis, 89–92, 100 Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston, 1941), 105 Man, a Woman, and a Bank, A (Noel Black, 1979), 205, 222 Man for All Seasons, A (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), 194, 196, 198 Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979), 7, 9, 83 Mansfield, Jayne, 160 Manz, Linda, 83 Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976), 6 Marie (Roger Donaldson, 1985), 186

247

Marshall, Garry, 69 Martino, Al, 66 Marx, Karl, 212, 224 Mary, Queen of Scots (Charles Jarrott, 1971), 195 M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970), 202, 204, 208 Maslin, Janet, 228 Mason, Clifford, 102 Mass Psychology of Fascism, The (Wilhelm Reich), 212–214 Matter of Time, A (Vincente Minnelli, 1976), 13 Matthau, Walter, 3 Mayfield, Curtis, 104 Mazursky, Paul, 208 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), 36, 46, 47, 50, 55, 189–191, 190, 193 McCall’s (magazine), 25, 45 McCambridge, Mercedes, 128 McGovern, George, 48, 98, 191 McGraw, Ali, 3 McNichol, Kristy, 83 McQueen, Steve, 6 Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), 65, 85 Memoirs of a Survivor (David Gladwell, 1981), 194 Mercer, Mae, 93 Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), 46 Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969), 4–6, 103, 140 Miles, Rosalind, 114 Milland, Ray, 129 Miller, Arthur, 201 Miller, David, 221 Minnelli, Liza, 13–15 Minnelli, Vincente, 13 Miss Mary (María Luisa Bemberg, 1986), 194 Mitchum, Robert, 105, 135 Mondo Trasho (John Waters, 1969), 163–164 Monnet, Madeline, 37 Monroe, Marilyn, 16, 36 Moon, Michael, 176 Moore, Mary Tyler, 224–225 Moorehead, Agnes, 131 Moreau, Jeanne, 160 Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966), 194 Morin, Edgar, 165 Morrissey, Paul, 165

248

INDEX

Ms. (magazine), 31, 45 Multiple Maniacs (John Waters, 1970), 166–168 Mulvey, Laura, 190 Murder by Decree (Bob Clark, 1979), 221 Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974), 195–197 Mussolini, Benito, 215 My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), 36 My Hustler (Andy Warhol, 1965), 163 Nader, Ralph, 48 Nanny, The (Seth Holt, 1965), 134 Naremore, James, 69 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 103, 112 National Association of Working Women, 31 Natural, The (Barry Levinson, 1984), 43 Near, Holly, 210 Negotiating Hollywood (Danae Clark), 200 Negro Ensemble Company (theater group), 107 Nero, Franco, 195 Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976), 147–149, 153 New Democratic Party (Canada), 207 Newman, Paul, 3, 6 Newsweek (magazine), 13, 42, 44, 116 Newton, Helmut, 153 Newton, Huey, 113 New York Column (newspaper), 24, 37 New York Daily News (newspaper), 26 New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977), 13 New York Post (newspaper), 11, 20, 22, 103 New York Sunday News (newspaper), 29 New York Times (newspaper), 24–25, 42, 51, 58, 66, 71, 80, 96, 112, 197, 216 New Yorker, The (magazine), 50–51, 227 Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976), 129–130, 130 Nicholson, Jack, 3, 5, 62, 144, 147, 147, 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 140 Night Games (Mai Zetterling, 1966), 167 Night of the Hunter, The (Charles Laughton, 1955), 123–124, 134–135 Night Porter, The (Liliana Cavani, 1974), 179

1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976), 214–216, 218, 224 Nine to Five (Colin Higgins, 1980), 18, 31, 38 Nixon, Richard, 17, 23, 29, 53, 64, 208 Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979), 186 Occupied Palestine (David Koff, 1980), 200 O’Connor, Donald, 229 Omen, The (Richard Donner, 1976), 129 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Vincente Minnelli, 1970), 10–11 Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968), 24 O’Neal, Ryan, 3, 11 O’Neal, Tatum, 3, 82–84 Only Game in Town, The (George Stevens, 1970), 46 Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980), 205, 222–225 Out of Season (Alan Bridges, 1975), 195 Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), 105 Owens, Wayne, 47 Pacino, Al, 6, 61, 61–81, 75, 80, 216, 226, 231 Pakula, Alan J., 208, 212 Palestinian, The (Roy Battersby, 1977), 200 Panic in Needle Park, The (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971), 62, 68, 75, 75 Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973), 82 Papillon (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973), 6 Parallax View, The (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), 49, 57, 97 Parker, Francine, 210 Parks, Gordon, 103–106, 108, 111–114, 116 Parmar, Pratibha, 85 Parsons, Lindsley Jr., 107 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 140, 166 Patch of Blue, A (Guy Green, 1965), 102 Patterson, James, 41, 52 Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970), 24 Pearce, Mary Vivian, 168 Peck, Gregory, 129 People (magazine), 32, 90, 95, 122, 156–157 Penn, Arthur, 46, 139 Peretz, Susan, 74 Perfect (James Bridges, 1985), 229

INDEX

249

Perkins, Tessa, 33 Peters, Jon, 13 Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968), 185 Philadelphia Daily News (newspaper), 104 Photoplay (magazine), 23–24, 32, 122 Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972), 164, 167, 169, 171–172, 175–178, 177 Place in the Sun, A (George Stevens, 1951), 123 Playing for Time (Daniel Mann, 1980), 201 Play It Again, Sam (Herbert Ross, 1972), 7 Poitier, Sidney, 3–4, 6, 101–102, 106, 117–118 Polanski, Roman, 135–136, 139, 144, 156 Pollack, Sydney, 69 Poor Little Rich Girl (Andy Warhol, 1965), 140 Poseidon Adventure, The (Ronald Neame, 1972), 121, 124–126, 136, 149 Prentiss, Paula, 58 Presley, Elvis, 229 Pretty Baby (Louis Malle, 1978), 83, 89–94, 92, 100 Primus, Barry, 140 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 131, 134 Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), 161, 230 Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Jerry Schatzberg, 1970), 139–143, 141

Reeve, Christopher, 231–232 Reich, Wilhelm, 203, 212–215 Reid, Mark, 103 Reisz, Karel, 194 Reynolds, Burt, 3, 15 Reynolds, Debbie, 131–134 Richardson, Tony, 194 Riley, Clayton, 112 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 140 Ritter, Thelma, 132 Robertson, Cliff, 58 Robertson, Hugh, 103 Rodham, Hillary, 83 Rodowick, D. N., 190, 192 Roeg, Nicolas, 187, 189, 212 Rolling Stone (magazine), 24, 31, 36, 49, 77 Roman Candles (John Waters, 1966), 163 Rome, Sydne, 95 Rona Barrett’s Gossip (magazine), 230 Ronde, La (Roger Vadim, 1964), 23 Roof, Judith, 131–132 Rose, Al, 91 Rose, Billy, 11–12 Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), 135 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 163–164 Rosenberg, Stuart, 139, 149 Roundtree, Richard, 4, 101, 101–119, 108, 115, 117 Ruby (Curtis Harrington, 1977), 129 Russell, Ken, 194

Quirk, Lawrence, 50

Sailor from Gibraltar, The (Tony Richardson, 1967), 194 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 23 Sand, George, 140 Sarandon, Chris, 74 Sarandon, Susan, 91 Sarris, Andrew, 35, 86 Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), 61, 68, 229 Scalphunters, The (Sydney Pollack, 1968), 112–113 Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1972), 62, 67–72, 70 Scarface (Brian DePalma, 1983), 63, 68, 81 Scary Movie (Keenan Ivory Wayans, 2000), 180 Schatzberg, Jerry, 62, 139–140, 142 Schickel, Richard, 77 Schlesinger, John, 5, 184, 195, 214

Racette, Francine, 206 Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987), 227 Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), 65 Ramparts (magazine), 26 Reagan, Ronald, 19, 29, 88, 100, 226, 229 Rear Window (Jeff Bleckner, 1998), 231 Red and Blue (Tony Richardson, 1967), 194 Redford, Robert, 3, 11, 35, 39, 39–60, 44, 59, 112, 216, 221–222, 225, 226 Redgrave, Vanessa, 32, 182, 182–184, 194–201, 198 Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981), 42, 46, 48–49, 52, 227 Reed, John, 42, 48 Reed, Oliver, 122–123 Reed, Rex, 11, 26, 227

250

INDEX

Schoell, William, 50, 65 School for Sex (Pete Walker, 1968), 113 Schrader, Paul, 80, 96 Schroder, Ricky, 156 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 81, 229 Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964), 164 Scorsese, Martin, 15, 65, 68, 85–86 Searchers, The (John Ford, 1956), 98 Searching for Debra Winger (Roseanna Arquette, 2002), 229 Sedgwick, Edie, 140 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 134, 176 Seduction of Joe Tynan, The (Jerry Schatzberg, 1979), 228 Segal, George, 31 Sentinel, The (Michael Winner, 1977), 129 Sepia (magazine), 107, 111 Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973), 61–62, 65, 67, 71–72 Seven Per-Cent Solution, The (Herbert Ross, 1975), 195 Seventeen (magazine), 24 Shadowlands (Richard Attenborough, 1993), 228 Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971), 101–114, 108, 118–119 Shaft (John Singleton, 2000), 112 “Shaft” (TV show), 116–118 Shaft’s Big Score (Gordon Parks, 1972), 108, 111, 114–116, 115 Shaft in Africa (John Guillermin, 1973), 108–109, 116, 117 Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975), 40, 45, 49, 52, 55, 185–186, 187, 190–193 Sheen, Martin, 96 Shepherd, Cybill, 97 Shields, Brooke, 82, 82–83, 89–94, 92, 100 Shire, Talia, 226 Shore, Dinah, 228 Silence of the Lambs, The (Jonathan Demme, 1991), 85 Silent Night, Bloody Night (Theodore Gershuny, 1974), 129 Silkwood (Mike Nichols, 1983), 186, 228 Silliphant, Stirling, 103, 107, 109, 116 Simon, John, 65 “Simpsons, The” (TV show), 180 Sinatra, Frank, 157 Siskel, Gene, 79 Skow, John, 82–83 Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973), 7

Smith, Jack, 163, 178 Smith, Liz, 46, 49 Sontag, Susan, 132 Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982), 228 Sorvino, Paul, 78 “Soup, The” (TV show), 180 Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961), 45 S*P*Y*S (Irvin Kershner, 1974), 205 Stallone, Sylvester, 62, 81, 229–230 Star Is Born, A (Frank Pierson, 1976), 6, 11, 12, 13 Start the Revolution Without Me (Bud Yorkin, 1970), 208 Stayin’ Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983), 229–230 Steelyard Blues (Alan Myerson, 1973), 26, 205, 209 Sterile Cuckoo, The (Alan J. Pakula, 1969), 13 Stewart, James, 117 Still of the Night (Robert Benton, 1982), 228 Sting, The (George Roy Hill, 1973), 43, 45–46, 57 St. Jacques, Raymond, 103 St. John, Christopher, 113 Stole, Mink, 167 Storyville, New Orleans (Al Rose), 91 Storyville Portraits (Ernest Bellocq), 91 Strasberg, Lee, 6, 33 Streep, Meryl, 165, 187, 227–228 Streisand, Barbra, 3, 6, 10–13, 12, 39, 138, 151 Studlar, Gaylyn, 176 Sturges, John, 204, 214 Superfly (Gordon Parks, 1972), 103–104, 114 Superman (Richard Donner, 1978), 231–232 Sutherland, Donald, 27, 188, 202, 202–225, 209, 217, 223 Sutherland, Kiefer, 207 Sweet Smell of Success, The (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957), 104 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), 102–103, 107, 112, 114 Szymanski, Michael, 95 Tall Story (Joshua Logan, 1960), 17 Tarantino, Quentin, 63, 113

INDEX

Taubin, Amy, 98–99 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), 7, 65, 68, 83–84, 87–88, 94–100, 97, 127 Taylor, Elizabeth, 3, 160 Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (Otto Preminger, 1970), 13 Tenant, The (Roman Polanski, 1976), 129, 135–136 Tentacles (Ovidio G. Assonitis, 1977), 129 Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968), 167 Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983), 228 Thank God It’s Friday (Robert Klane, 1978), 228 There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007), 36 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969), 21 This Property Is Condemned (Sydney Pollack, 1966), 43 Thomas, Von Eric, 93 Thompson, Fletcher, 23 Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975), 46, 49, 57–58 Tidyman, Ernest, 103, 113 Time (magazine), 9–10, 42, 51, 77, 82, 90 “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The” (TV show), 122–123 To Sir with Love (James Clavell, 1967), 102 Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard and Pierre Gorin, 1972), 25 Towering Inferno, The (John Guillermin, 1974), 149, 156 Tracy, Spencer, 120 Travolta, John, 3, 61–62, 68, 229–232 Trojan Women, The (Michael Cacoyannis, 1971), 195–196 Trudeau, Pierre, 208 Trumbo, Dalton, 208, 211 Turner, Lana, 160 TV Guide (magazine), 118 Uninvited (Patricia White), 131–132 Unmarried Woman, An (Paul Mazursky, 1977), 226 Up the Sandbox (Irvin Kershner, 1972), 11 Urban Cowboy (James Bridges, 1980), 228 Vadim, Roger, 17, 24, 29, 31, 139 Vailland, Elisabeth, 22 Van Fleet, Jo, 135

251

Van Peebles, Melvin, 102, 112–114 Variety (newspaper), 86–87, 103 Vertov, Dziga, 171, 210 Village Voice (newspaper), 35, 65, 86, 163 Virgin Queen, The (Henry Koster, 1955), 165 Viva (magazine), 29 Viva (Warhol superstar), 140 Voight, Jon, 33, 140, 156 Voutsinas, Andreas, 25 Voyage of the Damned (Stuart Rosenberg, 1976), 149–151, 153 Wagner, Richard, 140 Walters, Barbara, 30 Wanamaker, Sam, 150 Warden, Jack, 40 Warhol, Andy, 95, 140, 163–165 Warren, Earl, 110 Washington Post (newspaper), 32, 58 Waters, John, 160–164, 167–169, 171–173, 175–177 Wayne, John, 3 Way We Were, The (Sydney Pollack, 1973), 11, 39–40, 44 Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), 164 Werner, Oskar, 150 West, Nathanael, 214 Wexler, Haskell, 18 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), 130–134 What’s New, Pussycat? (Clive Donner and Richard Talmadge, 1965), 7 What’s the Matter with Helen? (Curtis Harrington, 1971), 129–134, 133, 137 What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972), 11 White, John, 106 White, Patricia, 131 Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (Curtis Harrington, 1971), 129, 134–135, 137 Wild Females, The (Carlos Samoya, 1968), 113 Williams, Billy Dee, 106 Williams, Robin, 68 Williamson, Fred, 119 Willis, Gordon, 67 Wilson, Earl, 11 Winger, Debra, 228–229 Winters, Shelley, 120, 120–137, 127, 130, 133 Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming, 1939), 14

252

INDEX

Wolf, Peter, 156 Wolfe, Tom, 2 Womack, Bobby, 104 Wood, Edward D. Jr., 165 Wood, Natalie, 98 Woodfield, William Read, 118 Workers Revolutionary Party (political organization), 196 Wyler, William, 11

Yanks (John Schlesinger, 1979), 195–197 Year of Magical Thinking, The (play, Joan Didion, 2007), 200 Young Americans for Freedom (political organization), 30 Zeffirelli, Franco, 140, 156 Zinnemann, Fred, 194, 198