Thurs. the Looking Glass: NIGHT OF THE COMET, LIQUID SKY + Mary Woronov

INTRO:

Thurs. the Looking Glass: a new series covering 1980s science fiction and horror films which may have crept through the myriad mirror mazes of time and eluded deserving viewers. Many are being rediscovered now, thanks in large part to the stunning work of Shout Factory's new Scream! offshoot (see my praise piece on Bright Lights) which has been giving these half-forgotten treasures snazzy hand-painted new covers and the kind of film-specific attention to detail only a fan could bring, conceive, and appreciate. Scream Factory, we hail thee.

Preface: To be a teenager in the 1980s was a terrible nightmare of dwindling freedom and choking sameness. We started out the decade as children running wild, puffing our Winston Lights and Marlboro Reds at the designated junior high school smoking area, engaging in unprotected everything, wiling away the hours at Spaceport or just driving around in our inherited Ford Mavericks looking for empty parking lots to cry or try to have sex in, or talk seriously about our relationships. We got busted by over-eager cops for so much as drinking a beer in our own backyard. Someone we know got busted for drugs, even. Metal heads only told us he'd laced the joint with PCP until it was too late to say no. We wouldn't anyway, fuck Nancy Reagan. Watching our freedoms dwindle one by one in the name the angry distraught mothers of MADD, and etc. There was nothing to do but go to the mall... again.

1982 ad for Montgomeryville PA drive-in, where I saw too much. 

But we had the movies. Horror and science fiction films in the 80s didn't have to shell out zillions to even break even. They could launch a few local TV spots and just ease on into one independently-owned theater or all-night triple feature drive-in, slowly moving down in font size on the marquee as other titles rolled in. Enough oddball films had become huge hits-- Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Road Warrior, Conan, Halloween --that producers were willing to roll the dice. Some we didn't like then but love now and vice versa. Looking back through the Thurs. looking glass, they're of different value according to their facets, but all are gems.

What's most to love is that there was no CGI in the 1980s: no rules, no format. Compare that to now, where everything is just the same old zombies and torture chambers, and wince for today's lost teenagers - who never have to leave their rooms to see things that would turn our aged blood cold.

NIGHT OF THE COMET

1984 - ***1/2

One of the stealth 80s heroines, Catherine Mary Stewart (top) looks like a tougher teen version of Linda Hamilton, and plays a total 80s nerd dream girl who works at a local theater, dominates the high score list at the lobby Galaga-imitation, eats Twizzlers for breakfast, and sleeps with the projectionist more out of boredom and not wanting to go home and deal with her stepmom's comet party, and kicks ass and shoots straight thanks to a Special Ops father who taught her and her sister self defense before heading off to deep tactical cover in Nicaragua. It doesn't. Apocalypse occurs. And the survivors are the ones who for some reason didn't bother seeing the comet; who missed the show, and kept safe behind metal walls (like a projection room). The partially exposed are devolving into homicidal mutants and/or Omega Man style crumbling vampire zombies, stock boys turned new wave machine gun killers, and a cadre of underground bunker scientists racing for a cure.

The empty LA orange and red skies and streets (since movies like this usually steal shots at dawn) have a mysterious, lonesome; a few zombies and evil scientists putter around (this is not a film that can afford zombie crowd shots). But there's cozy use of an automated radio station (probably the real sound studio where the overdubs were done), the local theater, lots of 80s neon. Eating Raoul's Mary Woronov is a good scientist and Robert Beltran a truck driver. Beltran gets top billing credits but it's clearly Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney who carry the weight as the sisters, displaying a believable rapport that includes cool banter, rivalry, shared laughter, commiseration, sororal support, petty bickering, and Mac 10 target practice.

As the little sister, Maroney shreds every line wavering from girly cheerleader one minute, telling off the stepmom the next, realizing slowly and believably the world's over, and coming to terms with grief over her dead friends and blown possible lover opportunities, yet still able to rock an amok consumer post-apocalyptic department store montage set to "Girls just want to have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. But hey, it had just come out the year before, and shopping montages set to it did not yet exist.

Unfortunately for us, that montage has become inescapable while super cool and self-reliant girls like these are almost impossible to find in any film, Hollywood or other. They can have a bubbly sisterly reunion deep in an evil scientist bunker and never take their guns off their prisoners or let down their guard; they're emotional and sometimes frivolous without being flighty or whimpering. They're like Hawks heroines as teenagers in the 80s: Maroney the Martha Vickers /Marilyn Monroe type, Stewart the Lauren Bacall/Jane Russell. They'll steal your gun, knock you off the high score list, jack your whip and kick you in the nuts if you sass back, but if you're cool...

The weirdest part of the film is that nowhere in the credits is there a sign of Paul Bartel or Penelope Spheeris or Joe Dante or Alan Arkush, all of whom worked for Corman and inherited his flair for feminist but sexy dialogue, racial equality, beatnik wit, and knack for conveying their films are part of a larger film world, almost like connectors between other, bigger-budgeted films  (i.e. Cameron's Terminator was what connected Blade Runner to Halloween). If no Corman or Bartel connection, why are there two leads from Eating Raoul, and a conspicuous movie poster for Death Race 2000 on the theater door?

Oh well, the film has a genial mellowness is all its own, or writer-director Thom E. Eberhardt's, or maybe the cast's. Before this film Eberhart only did one film, Sole Survivor which prefigures the Final Destination films by 20 years with the same plot (I hear), and afterwards a film called The Night Before, starring Keanu Reeves. This tells us nothing, having no way to see them. Maybe we can just chalk it up to something intangible made flesh by the mere presence of Mary Woronov, the Patti Smith of the quasi-mainstream neo-underground horror-sci fi-comedy genre, and chance.

LIQUID SKY

1982 - ****

This is a rarity, a genuinely great performance art science fiction hybrid  experimental 16mm oddity from the downtown NYC heroin chic fashion poseur scene, what Bowie probably hoped The Man who Fell to Earth would be like. Russian ex-pat Slava Tsukerman co-wrote with the star, Anna Carlisle, who plays both Margaret (a sleepwalking model with a fondness for bizarro face paint) and a perennially sneering male model in the Ziggy mode named Jimmy. If this was a guy playing both roles it might just be the usual camp drag theatricality, but Carlisle brings a depth of wry sadness that's almost Germanic, belying her being just 26 years-old at the time, though she announces she's from Connecticut ("Pilgrim stock!") in one of the film's key and classic scenes. She crushes it! She takes both roles over the edge, even going down on herself while fashionistas (before there was such a phrase) jeer jadedly.

Man, those effete women and manly men who spend their nights milling around tiny black box apartments and boutiques, engaging in never ending private fashion shows in vain attempts to stand out from a stable of similarly face-painted and ennui-and-withdrawal-driven wild clotheshorses. Meanwhile a German scientist named Johann (Otto Von Wernher) has followed a tiny spacecraft about the size a closed George Foreman grill to the roof above the East Village penthouse flat Margaret shares with her knife wielding Valerie Solanis-style performance artist heroin dealer lesbian girlfriend Adrian (Paula E. Shepherd, below).

The plot follows Margaret as she tries to do some coke, but winds up raped by a sleazy goombah who force feeds her goofballs --it's not a traumatic scene like some because she fights back and engages but at the same time barely gives a fuck --she knows she'll get him back eventually and she's patient as a cobra; Jimmy meanwhile is withdrawing from heroin but has no money and Adrian won't front; a fashion designer promises Jimmy some if he shows up to model the next night at a shoot on Margaret's roof. Meanwhile the alien is floating his giant solarized color style eye thing around, observing all like a mix of the aliens in It Came from Outer Space and ourselves as viewers. It maybe hides behind the white mask in the center of Margaret's weird neon hula hooped painting. When her lovers have their selfish orgasm, a cigarette burn in the celluloid behind their head sucks them right out of the film, leaving her free to resume high fashion moping. Good deal! Her own inability to have an orgasm saves her life, and allows her to notice her little alien guardian. Though she never sees it (them?) she falls in love with it and forms a bond as touching as that between the disembodied Virginia Leith and her unseen closet monster in The Brain that Wouldn't Die!

In short, a beautiful time is had by all, especially if you don't mind repetitive synthesizer percussion that resounds on high decibel pitch-shifted soundwaves like an angry filmmaker is just learning his first and only melody on his first and only Korgi synthesizer. Highlights include Adrian's inspired spontaneous poetry rant delivered while beating Margaret's dead naked acting teacher as a bongo drum; the odd but natural way two people hanging out in bed can devolve into attempted rape and/or stabbing without either one particularly feeling the need to get up; and Margaret's inspired final monologue, delivered as she applies intense glow-in-the-dark face paint in pitch darkness, like Kali, Warhol, and a stoned Annette Haven wrapped up into one tall WASP fashionista **** But there's also the coolness that is Susan Doukas as Jimmy's sex-starved mother, who seduces--or tries to--Johann when he uses her apartment (its opposite Margaret's) to spy on the craft and check out all the deaths and sexes. He continually ducks out on her, maybe saving both their lives in the process though frustrating her to no end, which caused me the most discomfort in the film, as I hate to see a lady go hungry and Doukas does a hell of a job at conveying the homey warmth and welcome forwardness (even if its tinged with desperation) one hopes for from sex-starved middle-aged Manhattan foxes with big apartments in the 70s--80s, the type who know their Chinese food deliverer by name and with whom you can probably crash for a few weeks while you pretend to look for an apartment. Dude, I'm grateful to dames like that and they deserve to have their needs gratified if for no other reason that they are bold enough to admit they have them and to pursue their quarry and this film is a gem.

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Mary Woronov, with the Velvet Underground and her co-whip dancer, Gerard Malanga

Lastly, a shout out to the beautiful and tall and cool Mary Woronov, the living link between the great 70s-80s rock and roll sci fi-New Wave-Punk-Corman-Canon cineworld and the Warhol Velvet Underground joint. Check her above, snuggled up with mighty Lou! Edie Sedgwick may be the one everyone gushes over but its Woronov, more than any of them, who's a true rock and roll survivor. She's still got it! She sheds some insight on why she's seldom left the niche cult market and taken parts in big Hollywood films: 

"Let's face it: women's parts are gone ­ women are gone. They've disappeared from the movie screens! You know when I was working with Warhol there was no problem because it was a homosexual atmosphere. But in Hollywood it's a heterosexual atmosphere, and they do not like to see strong women. So instead of actresses we've got hostesses. 'May I show you to your seat, Mr. Schwarzenegger?' So that's why I keep doing...these other movies." (1990 Cornell Cinemas)

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Damn girl, it's their fucking loss and the gain of all weird movie lovers... 

Postscript: I wasn't sure why I put these two films together for this inaugural Thurs. the Looking Glass entry, but Woronov is the key. Sure she's not in Sky but her girl strength and Warholian style is, and both films are rare in that they star women with boys way, way to the side. In fact the genders are almost reversed - the women are in charge in both films, recalling in their way Star Maidens and Norman Fell's almost-forgotten All that Glitters! Release them! (See my article about them in Acidemic's Nordics issue)

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Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the life of a regimented life of a young Austrian noble (Dietrich, in curls) is contrasted with the DeMille-level lurid tortures of the Proletariat at the hands of the Cossacks. The handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge suddenly materializes like a tall shadow person with sable highlights in the stuffy Prussian parlor of Catherine's mother, and things start looking up, but the pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies and airless claustrophobia is a long time going. One unbearable matriarch after another pokes and prods Dietrich like a piece of meat at the butcher's until your feminist blood is curdling, and it's only after Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow that we feel we can start to soak up the glories of the snow and the richly photographed sable wraps. But Moscow is just more poking, at the hands of the reigning queen in Russia, a perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser overplaying to near Shelly Winters-ish levels), and her no-good nephew Peter (Sam Jaffe), the half-wit prince and Catherine's betrothed, prefers prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland rather than bedding his young wife. She's fine with that, but the dowager is ranting about needing a male offspring out of her, in a way that makes Bette Davis' mom in Now Voyager seem a model of compassion.

Well, if Peter won't bed her, she better find someone who can, fast, and keep it on the DL. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds past the camera (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras"),  intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit"), drab nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, interminable liturgies droned in candle-lit churches, endless ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, stuffy, boring film that ever included shots of topless women being flogged and branded.

That said, if you're in the right frame of mind (the kind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin) you can forgive Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and dig how Peter's drilling holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky reflects  JVS' own predilection for the peeping camera, and sponge up the aesthetic gloom overkill and be able to just lean back and watch Dietrich age quicker than her character does over the course of the film thanks to (based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry) the cruelty inflicted on his icy star.

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigar-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed sewing circle ringleader Mercedes De Acosta (lover of Garbo). It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives new inmate Barbara Stanwyck and though she never came out of the closet it's interesting to find Babs semi-mocking a (possible) fellow sewing circle sister onscreen. But at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors and stern masseuses (such as a recently restored scene of one taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY) were winked at but never bullied, which is at least more than they'd get after the code, when they'd have to just disappear, deep back into the closet.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

The bulk of the film deals with a love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster), the kind where each has to continually top the other in sacrifice and honesty. He gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory, so she confesses she was really guilty. He sends her to the joint, so she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to help her. Dan's terminal earnestness is all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they give Stanwyck full license for two-fisted feminine shots at chin of the status quo, the kind of target Sharon Stone aimed for in Basic Instinct but never really shattered like Babs does here. The huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave; hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar except. When Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2
It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at MGM, the studio who had the hardest time being truly subversive and often wound up just kinky and deeply racist instead. Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) begins the film saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing Cairo train, and afterwards affixes himself to a striking British socialite played by Myrna Loy. Naturally, it being MGM, miscegenation would be out of the question, except that --like all British socialites visiting Egypt who catch the eye of skulking Arabs--she has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead before the film starts, saving any alleged social discomfort with the all-white side of the family). In Egypt to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny) and his unbearably controlling mater, she's blessed with the king of 'harrumph' - C. Aubrey Smith (lower left) as a more understanding pater. Clearly MGM is pointing towards two 1932 hits for its box office hopes ---Universal's THE MUMMY and Columbia's BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. But it's still MGM and therefore falls woefully short of Paramount's surreal charms or Universal's lurid expressionism, even Columbia's humanist handball, even if the pyramids are superbly evoked and the whole scene mad with magic.

 Emil first worms his way into her flower-choked hotel room via offers of service as a guide, enduring the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British and then turning the tables. If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO desert to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of General Yen, well you'll find the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene to be approximately sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders.

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

1931 - **

British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the other man who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in.... India, and always squarely on the MGM stage. The best parts are in the beginning with porcelain collector Erich Von Stroheim (as Damita's aesthete husband) lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort as one of his wife's lover caught with a lame alibi. It turns out Erich's habit is to blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. She can be charming, but when she's not 'on' she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting all day and is tired of being prodded and mussed by the make-up lady. Nice legs, though. Too bad that fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier later tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings).

This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps everyone out on the curb after weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots them out for conformity's sake. It's a lot familiar (for the era) triangle business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips and alleged sex appeal. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim's porcelain, to the floor in shards if needed!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

1932 - **1/2

Divorce, scandalous, risque and o-so progressive in and of itself, was still enough of a subject for a films back in 1932, even at the already risque and progressive Warner Brothers, so here's novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. She wants to have a little fun in Paris first but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably but Brent always presumes that is the case, which is one reason I dislike him. His whole attitude reflects the gateway rationalization of rapists. Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in a Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works, until maybe the very end, (unless the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra).

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's investment broker ex-husband starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at ritzy clubs with his new, younger Paris Hilton-esque wife. So Chatterton comes home and throws her weight around to keep him afloat, rather than marrying the sappy and sacharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?" like it's the cleverest string of words ever uttered.  Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce are rather adultly presented. Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced on the drive home that she's pregnant but doesn't want to have the baby since it would ruin her figure and tie her down to some squawling brat, for example, she's instantly killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.

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Morphine, Cappucine, and Dino De: FRAULEIN DOKTOR (1968)

Currently available only on Netflix streaming is this hitherto unbeknownst to me big budget, ponderous, confusingly edited, reasonably engrossing, mildly titillating melodrama from Dino De Laurentiis, FRAULEIN DOKTOR (1968). Also known as FRAULEIN DOCTOR (on Netflix), it's the story of a German morphine-addict bisexual super spy, and is clearly structured along a DR. ZHIVAGO (1965) template, which is to say, it has big elaborate international WW1/Russian Revolution-era sweep; Jarre-ish orchestral soundtrack (by Ennio!), a superfluously detailed train journey; a big crowd scene gas attack, and romantic leads who look a lot like Julie Christie and Omar Shariff (Suzy Kendall and James Booth).



However, this ain't your mom's ZHIVAGO clone, unless your mom is a lesbian junky super spy working for WW1 Germany. The opening barbed wire silhouette and deep color splotch credit design is something straight out of the Corman Poe series, which is the next best thing to Saul Bass in the cool credits depts, and in some ways its kin are less ZHIVAGO and more the Marlene Dietrich Von Sternberg collaboration DISHONORED / Garbo's code-ruined MATA HARI... but 'bigger' and far dirtier, and more allegedly true. It dips its toes in a druggy kind of debauched super genius nastiness--our fraulein shoots up a lot of morphine, and when she stares lustily at the shots being given to dying soldiers, you feel her longing - and the lesbian seduction has a creepy Aldrich-ish freakshow quality--while staying true to the Zhivagosian 'sweep.' It's got De Laurentiis' fingerprints all over it, and most of all, as per De Laurentiis' best works, there's a sense of real moral ambiguity, where immorality is championed and condemned in equal measure.

I never did much cotton to ZHIVAGO (the only character I liked was Rod Steiger's, so it made rooting for Omar a real hard task) but I dig that FRAULEIN takes what it wants (sweep, time period, trains) and leaves the rest, and that it keeps itself under two hours, and doesn't get lost in a maddening love story so much as have occasional touches of 'what might have been' but may or may not be two lovers bullshitting each other. But for all the differences, there's no doubt what blockbuster film our FRAULEIN is aping. Below are a bunch of stills and such... can you guess which are from Doctor Zhivago and which Doctor Fraulein?







(Answers, top to bottom: Zhivago 1, 4 / Fraulein - 2,3,5)

Far less lush than Dr. Z, and occasionally dopey, Dr. F is still underrated, under-seen and would be just a stilted sweeper ala ENGLISH PATIENT, except for one thing -- Ennio Morricone!




Ennio Morricone was more than just the guy who brought electric guitars to the western, or children's sing song la la la's to giallo -- he proved that the right music could 'make' a movie appear out of nothing but a bunch of scenes. Under his baton the score became as essential an ingredient as actors or dialogue, even more so where international films are concerned and dubbing issues could often muddle and sour the story without a weird musical score to fill in the blanks. DOKTOR's long lesbian scenes with Cappucine, the druggy 'shooting up' music when our junky anti-heroine fumbles for her vial; or the heroic little gestures of the Giancarlo Giannini's world weary spy, are amped up like a case of delirium tremenswhen Morricone is working the magic. Suddenly something that is inert becomes tragic and larger than life. Make no mistake, without Morricone, Italian exploitation cinema, from giallo to Laurentiis' blockbusters, would be nothing!



The film is all allegedly true, but you know espionage tales, you'll never get straight facts. Just enjoy the luridness and the first rate cast: Capucine (above) as a lesbian poison gas designer; Kenneth More as the head of British Intelligence; Nigel Green (COUNTESS DRACULA) as the head of German Intelligence, and a large crew of extras marching around in gas masks for the big finale, making me wonder if Ralph Bakshi used this movie for 'rotoscoping' backgrounds in WIZARDS. Best of all, it's World War One, not World War Two, so the German were still 'sporting' and 'gentlemanly' to a degree. You don't have to hate them as badly as you would in a few years. It's also worth scoping out if you liked, say, a very similar international De Laurentiis film that mixed adult elements like drugs, (real) animal killing, hot girls, and lesbianism in with its 'historical' story, BLUEBEARD (1972). All that's missing, really, is what saved BLUEBEARD from Burton's boozy somnambulistic hamming, a little minx named Joey Heatherton.



Joey Heatherton... you make life complete. And FRAULEIN DOKTOR, you're not far behind. Firing Squad, commence streaming!

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Vadim's Cold-Blooded Pimpin' - BLOOD AND ROSES (1960)

Based on an 1876 lesbian Gothic French story by Fanu, Carmilla, BLOOD AND ROSES is a film that's been mostly unseen since the early days of VHS in this country (it's now on netflix streaming), but even on the faded and duped on the DVD-R I saw it on recently, Vadim's ease with the jet set world of expensive balls, crumbling ancestral villas, heavy breathing, heartbeats, beautiful gowns, incest, casual sex and acceptance of inter-dimensional weirdness shows through.

I mention Vadim because to me--and I assume at least a few other Americans-- his is the ideal of what we would want our lives to be like, were we French. And even-- if like me-- you can't stand many of Vadim's other films, like Barbarella or ...And God Created Woman, you might find something cool hovering in the margins of Blood and Roses.

As an ex-libertine myself, I recognize that Vadim's conveying an atmosphere of socially sanctioned decadence with the relaxed confidence of someone who's been there. Vadim succeeds here in getting details just right, such as a swanky jetset masquerade party out on the lawn of the ancient Karstein estate, with fireworks and the emotionally vacant Carmilla (Annette Stroyberg, i.e. Anette Vadim) wandering off to the family crypt on her brother's wedding night, her dress trailing off behind her, into a the tomb of her ancient (female) Karstein relative; heart beating like mad on the soundtrack...eyes widening in terror!! Ah... but then fadeout and in the next scene it's dawn and she's taking a long stroll across the estate back to the party, where the guests are just now leaving!

You just don't see people leaving parties at dawn in American movies, at least not very often (I can think of only a few offhand: Dazed and Confused, The Anniversary Party, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Warriors). Nowadays no one in the USA dares stay up all night, they have kids! They have jobs! They have to go to church, or the firing range. Besides, in the post-Goodfellas world, filmmakers seldom bother to hang around anyone place long enough to make it to the dawn, or maybe because of our ban on smoking and bad behavior American  just don't know what it's like to stay up that late anymore here, now, it's too transgressive for them, too outside the box ( NYC of course, never sleeps, but is an exception). In America we've even dubbed such a walking home at dawn journey 'the walk of  'shame,' as if we should be ashamed of living like a vampire lesbian in a Vadim film!

The key thing with Vadim--both his power and his impotence as a director--is that the opaque glamor and complete lack of urgency or importance in his films is what the jet set languor is really all about. An easygoing member of Parisian cafe society, Vadim's films are notoriously inert, and it's clear why: he's just too satisfied. As I wrote in AJFM #5's Pimps: The Devil's Subjects: "You can't create tension if you've never been tense." Vadim's got no obsession because he already has or has had everything, including at least three of the most beautiful women who ever graced a movie screen (four if you count Annette, and you should). His amiable social butterfly nature has allowed him to enjoy life without excess drama. He was a Jew who had to hide from the Nazis, but it wasn't too bad (he hid in Switzerland, with the cows). It was just bad enough, it would seem, to lend him a steely courage in the face of beauty so overwhelming that ordinary men might faint. Not bad enough that he knows anything about crafting suspense, or narrative drive.

I don't think Americans are afraid of beauty and sex, we're afraid of losing our desire for beauty and sex, for what obsession can survive its fulfillment? If we gave into that awful moment of surrender, which (as T.S. Eliot notes) an age of prudence can never retract, we'd have nothing to get us out of bed in the morning, nothing to make us run to the airport at the very last minute to catch Drew Barrymore before her flight takes off, nothing to keep us buying DVDs and sublimating, nothing to bring us urgency. We'd in effect cease to be Americans. Everyone would tell us "you have a very European attitude." This is because America hinges on the command to enjoy, and the one essential commodity that can legally have no price tag is sex, and so it has us hypnotized. Yes, we may have sex in 'real life' but I'm talking mainly about real life mirrored in movies, wherein we go running after sex and dollars like the stumbling Jerry Lewis or, nowadays, the coveted nuclear family. Nowadays we've stopped prizing the Cary Grant and have lionized the Ralph Bellamy.

Americans don't like that the French like Jerry Lewis and that's perhaps the reason our rich wives drag us to the bourgeoisie 'naughty sex comedies at the Paris Theater, so that we can get cultured and distance ourselves from the Lewisness inside us. And though we're dreading all the subtitles or bad dubbing, Vadim whispers in our ear like a sly apache as we stand in the ticket line: "Don't worry, monsieur, the girl in this film... she is ...so beautiful."

Sometimes, beauty can not only be enough, it can drain the soul faster than any vampire ever could, and BLOOD AND ROSES is emblematic of this dissolute, drained, beauty-saturated ennui. While sleaze merchants around the world try to capture sex in an orgasmic blend of flesh and music, Vadim captures post-orgasmic depression, the feeling someone's siphoned off your precious... bodily fluids. 

Some of this entry originally appeared in Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #6, August 2010 

Read my take on Vadim as a pimp alongside Sport in Taxi Driver and John Derek, here.

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Comes in Colors: BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970)

When discussing the change from repressive 1950's-early 60's to late 60's-70's permissive hedonism (and then back again, post-1980) one should always be aware of what social studies classes don't want you to know: the elements directly responsible for mass social change aren't education and activism, they are: sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  You want to see how deep the wormhole goes? In the 1980's I had to look very hard before I could get my hands on 'doses' - it was dangerous and my freshmen coterie were scared to death of me once I'd 'broken through.' But in 1967 you could get dosed just by accepting a handful of free samples from Owsley's bucket brigade at the entrance of the latest love-in. It's so typically human--American even--that what was once casual, cool and even sanctioned by the middle class one decade (smoking around children, dosing) is considered a punishable offense a few years later, and the masses are way too hypnotized to think twice about it. (1)

Sex and music are well chronicled in our cultural history, but drugs, too, change with the times: LSD (60s) begets Valium (70s), because you need to come down, and then cocaine (80s) because you're sluggish from the Valium and then coke makes you depressed the next day so you need to cheer up for the 90s (ecstasy). And Then, in the 00s, glorious AA because none of that shit works anymore. And the 10's, because God thinks you're ready: Salvia Divinorum: harsh green reptilian gatekeepers debating whether to eat you alive or admit you to their tender garden. But salvia's gatekeepers wont keep the gate unlocked for long; even now attention-seeking senators who know nothing whatsoever about the plant are striving to make it illegal, solely based on a video with Miley Cyrus.

But, let's backtrack and add the music to the equation: Jimi Hendrix defined the 60s.. and acid. But in the 1970s, was there 'Valium music' the way there was acid rock?

Yes, the Carpenters. In the 1970s it could be found on something called 'variety shows' - day-glo family-friendly mixtures of ghastly Vaudeville, powder-blue leisure suits and bland musical numbers. The stars/hosts were generally a boy and a girl together, sometimes married (Shields and Yarnell, The Captain and Tenille; Sonny and Cher; Tony Orlando and Dawn) sometimes siblings (Donnie and Marie Osmond), sometimes both (Pink Lady and Jeff!). It was a time when kids shows were druggy and drug shows kiddy. Thanks to Rosie Greer and Marlo Thomas in a little thing called Free to Be You and Me, it was all right to cry,  and even boys could have dolls. I'd love a doll right now, in fact.



Dolls of course is a drug double entendre meaning Valium and/or whatever benzo/diazapam derivations--roofies, downers, yellowjackets, blues, Xanax---and anything you happen to have in your purse and may I have one? The other half of the entendre is that these are babes we're talking about, dolls on dolls, and like all good things, they come in packs of three (See also: Charlie's Angels and THREE ON A MATCH), and, lastly, dolls calm you down, like teddy bears for grown-ups.

An unofficial 'sequel' to THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (left), the adaptation of Jacqueline Suzanne's inexplicably popular junk novel, BEYOND is redeemed by three things - 1) the naive squarete' of the two guys behind the script and camera: Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert (!!), 2) the absolute gonzo coolness of the actors, particularly Z-Man (John Lazar) and Lance Rock (the late Michael Blodgett, a favorite of this blog), and 3) the hotness and deadpan comic delivery of the girls in the band--especially Cynthia Meyers, Dolly Read, and Edy Williams as Ashley St. Ives. There's also a segregated but nonetheless present subplot with black band member Marcia McBroom, as well as Charles "That's Jim Pembrey, Goddamnit" Napier, lesbians, drag kings, and a Nazi butler/bartender: "We could have used you at the Russian Front!" he exclaims in admiration of a punch-drunk flower child. Put it all together and you have something bound to offend everyone, sooner or later. It's like one of those "Funny or Die" videos where the rantings of a drunk child are lip-synced and acted out by an all-star adult cast. In this case it's cool, hip beautiful young actors mouthing dialogue written by ugly, lecherous squares.

All it's missing is any sense of restraint or human decency. Indeed there's a lot I don't like about this film, such as the template misogyny of the finale, wherein the lesbians are slaughtered without a shred of thought - "Theirs wasn't an evil love, but evil did come from it" - What the fuck is that about, Roger? How did evil come from being gay? One 'hopes' that Ebert is making fun of misogyny but it's still a little too much to have the lesbian get a gun in her mouth for daring to deign the cock. Considering how judgmental and alarmed he got about I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (see my Ebert-GRAVE piece here), it's odd that he should have written such a strangely homophobic film. Yet there are redemptive moments: Lance Rock pausing in his fight with the icky band manager Harris (David Gurian) to greet a cool black athlete named Randy (James Iglhart) and realizing they're the only two cool, real people in the room, and though they're both encroaching on the girls of the 'sweet, sensitive guys' like Emerson (Harrison Page) and Harris, it's okay. Harris and Emerson are so totally square even Ebert seems cool by comparison.

The original VALLEY's highlight was Patty Duke screaming for "dolls" in a back alley as the camera panned slowly up and away on an elaborate crane shot, like her guardian angel had finally had enough and was heading home --and while some bitchy drag queens may think that's hilarious stuff (which is fine), drug-addled divas on their way down are awfully easy targets for lampooning. Even with overacting and tone-deaf emotional registration you feel bad about sneering at VALLEY... the eerie echoes of meta self-reflexiveness are all over the film: gorgeous Sharon Tate killing herself in the film to escape her controlling mom and then dying at the hands of the Mansons shortly after; drug-addicted former child star Patty Duke playing a drug-addicted child star too fucked up to even play herself anymore. The sad Andre and Dory Previn theme song was supposed to have been sung by poor Judy Garland but for reasons likely mirrored in Duke's doll-loving arc, wasn't. Dionne Warwick took over and does a fine job, but she can't capture the mood like Judy, and the result is like being at your wit's end and visiting a new prison therapist who smiles but has no insight into your woes and makes you feel even more lonely than if you were alone.

BEYOND comes in after this meta-horror and plays up the venom underlying the 'reality' of the actresses in the film much more than its prequel even dared. Aside from taking place in 'the Valley' where Valley-yum runs wild and free, there's not a whit to compare them. But BEYOND has Russ Meyer's short attention span direction, it has LAUGH-IN style dancers who trade Wildean quips as they frug and countless situations where the degenerates are more moral than their breadhead equivalents.

Laugh-In ("One Ringy Dingy!")

Yet even as far as cult items go, DOLLS is an 'outside looking in' film, showing the relative lack of LA decadence-experience for screenwriters Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert. The pair are much better at revealing the hypocrisy of the rural gas station squares and winky-dink tourist trap sex than the groovy craziness of the LA elite --which makes sense since neither did any drugs nor likely got laid (Meyer did, naturally - not Ebert). Without the amazingness of Z-man and Lance, the film would be adrift in Brady Bunch denial, but Blodgett and Lazar do such a fine job, even when forced to manically utter whole pages of nonsensical Ebertsian madness written with no attention for how people really speak they bring it through the veil into 'high' art.

But the 1970s wasn't just about acid, coke, downers and free love, it was about innocence. We in Middle America didn't know the Village People were gay or what was making Karen Carpenter so skinny. We were clueless but free, ignorant in our bliss, bonded by a lack of options on aerial-antennae television. In the theaters, R-rated movies meant serious business, and the no-kids-admitted-without-parent thing was strictly enforced the way cigarette age restrictions are now.The R films of the 1970s were about tawdry NYC nightlife or Italian slashers -- or both. NYC in the 1970s was a cesspool with an oasis of Broadway shows surrounded by grimy XXX-rated deathtraps. But on TV, the innocent variety show ruled by default - appealing to no demographic in particular and therefore suitable for all - with the FM radio crooning love songs by guys who were tough and tender, like Bob Seger, or Dan Fogherty or couples out of love like Fleetwood Mac. Either they kept their drugs hidden from the kids. TV shows had a Zen quality wherein old timers from 30s B-movies could find homes as neighbors or square-swingers, while teen idols re-enacted 50s teen delinquent plot lines in hip hugger flares and wild afros.

In other words, it was a time before niche demarcations. The stoner had to lie down with the square; you could be weird but you couldn't curse. So we had Greg Brady donning a fringe jacket and hanging a mobile in the attic only to learn such things don't make him cool. You had film nerd Roger Ebert writing faux hipster LA dialogue for a bunch of authentic L.A. hipsters and filmed by a war correspondent softcore Brüstemann. Add those elements together to make a film that was rated X but seems almost suitable for children today, and you have something that's stood the test of time: a stoner film for your grandparents, a misogynist homophobic countercultural f-you to the man and to the hep cat.


While today, our copious late night cable channels demonstrate endlessly how painful it is watching normal people try to be weird. BEYOND THE VALLEY gives you weird people trying to be 'faux' weird --and you can feel the deranged energy spilling forth in the first or thousandth viewing. BEYOND never had a time of its own so it's never grown dated. It was too square for 1969 and too wild for 1970. It was too violent for the free love crowd and too free love for the violent crowd. It may not be art, but it's cult. I may not know cult but I know what I love and hate, and in BEYOND everything I love and hate is rolled into one dark, twisted snapshot of the whole goddamned whizzbang red white and blue hooplah frenzy that is Tinseltown.  BANG! BANG!

1. other evidences of drug hysteria having no correlation whatever to actual danger: At the turn of the century cocaine was in Coca-Cola, heroin was OTC, but aspirin was prescription only, and planes had smoking sections.What was all-pervasive and legal yesterday can become demonized as hell tomorrow, and no one thinks twice about it! Soylent Green is people! And YOU'RE NEXT!

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Blades in the Apple: LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, The Village People, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER & WINDOWS (When the Rainbow is Enuff)

It's easy to come across a "torn from today's swinging singles nightmare" headline movie like LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977) or CRUISING (1980) and think they're just exploitation fearmongering "scare" films that just kind of appeared at the side of 70s mainstream cinema like mutant babies left to die (as IT'S ALIVE, PROPHECY and THE MANITOU), but you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. And those of us who vaguely remember the thrilling danger of local drive-in movie and newspaper ads in the 1970s have a wide-eyed respect for the potent sexual menace of pre-GIULIANI Manhattan - it was scarier than Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman combined, and sexier than Barbarella with torn stockings.

From the safety of drunken wife-swap American suburbia, the weird mix of leather, queerness, and something called "a singles bar" seemed to be a provocation, almost a challenge. The sex in the suburbs was 'safe' but the "city" brand was cinematic. 70's Manhattan was a nightmare, a tourist freak show that was fine to pass by and gawk at but you just didn't want to dive right in and actually rescue a teenage prostitute or get mugged. Just as now tourists come to go to gawk at vast displays of WB and Disney goods, in the 1970's tourists would go to gawk at X-rated marquees and a street theater ballet melange of strutting pimps, jittery winos, wobbly hookers, and shifty-eyed junkies. As we got older, the idea was to sneak up there and find Plato's Retreat, a club where apparently everyone walked around naked and had sex in the open. My mom even helped us look for it, that will give you an idea of the weird sexual permissiveness of the era. By the time we were even older and actively looking for the "sleazy theater experience" ( if the word grindhouse was popular then, I don't remember) it was all winding down, way down... but I still remember the grisly, soul-stunning smell of the Roxy.

I remember, too, going in to see "a Broadway show" in scary old Times Square as a kid with my family, and waiting in the big outdoor, middle-of-42nd Street Cheap Tickets line and getting permission to run off by myself and get a coke from a nearby deli, weaving my way past shocking X-ray marquees and tons of depressing urban dirt, trash, grime, and decay. I was horrified, traumatized, turned-on, and nauseated.

 Letting a nine year-old kid run loose through that sort of neighborhood would be considered negligence today, but back then sleazy sex had a detached aura; we were exempt from harm by virtue of our disaffected stances. We weren't saints like kids are today, so there was less to despoil, a shorter distance to fall.  But I was still plenty scared going to get that Coke, but that just heightened my senses: cigars and asphalt tar for the olfactory; the roar of jackhammers and the groans and blaringly loud Kung Fu kicks coming from loops playing on a television in the marquis windows for the auditory; an overabundance of naked female flesh and twisted title marquis for the eyes, and it all swirled together and coalesced into the faded sadness of the woman's face on the pre-dirty and pre-faded Subway-style poster advertising For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff. As I walked I ran through the giant black and long-haired figures, it seemed locals seeing me, all alight and bug-eyed, began performing bizarre street scenes for my amusement, demanding only my feigned nonchalance and thinly feigned disinterest as payment.

Safely back in the suburbs, films like TAXI DRIVER (1976), MEAN STREETS (1973) and MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) provided the artsy boilerplates for not just our tourist perceptions, but a whole genre of 1970's films that used the vice-gripped city as a backdrop, from early 1980s video rentals like MS. 45 through to bigger budget mainstream grindhouse that capitalized on the 1970's suburban yen for singles bars and "aren't we glad we moved to the suburbs and had kids instead of staying single in the city" cautionary tales like DEATH WISH (1974), LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (both 1977). All you had to do was point a camera in New York and you had a movie about grime and vice, from graffiti-covered trains to wino-drenched stoops and turned-over, Ocarless garbage pails, it was all there without any need for set designers.

It's bizarre to think that William Friedkin was ever given a budget to make something like CRUISING (1980),  as the sadomasochistic homosexual environment of the West Village couldn't possibly turn on straight America and gay America was protesting it even before it was finished. The suits must have presumed the mainstream's penchant for inner-city sleaze extended to gawking at homosexuals, but they didn't factor that for all it's swinging medallion-on-the open chested liberalism, white middle class suburbia was still pretty provincial, and being very frank and open about your hatred and fear of gayness was how we knew you weren't gay, because there was so much loosey-goosey touchy-feely swinging going on, you needed to be clear up front, if only to yourself.

To give you an example, none of us knew The Village People singing "Macho Man" was at all gay. We thought it was, you know, Burt Reynolds-style cowboys and Indians... for the kids. If we'd have known the truth, "Macho Man" wouldn't have been the first .45 single I ever bought, that's for sure. I would have been afraid of reprisals and dints on my manly armor. We learned instead about the 'gay agenda in our midst' via Anita Bryant, who was always on the news, ranting and raving about gays corrupting our kids' morality, until even the starchiest parents figured that if an obviously evil old broad like this (the Sarah Palin of her era) was so anti-gay, then homosexuals must be all right... wherever they were. Thanks to Bryant we were guided from hating them as straw dogs to fearing they were amongst us to siding with them against the real menace, rabidly intolerant orange juice shills

Even so, at the pre-AIDS awareness moment of Friedkin's CRUISING (1980), gays were still pretty reviled outside city limits. The only "out" celeb of the day was Elton John, and he was British and already covered in so many feathers it made tarring redundant. Lesbians were a slightly different matter: sexy as long as they weren't too butch, we were fascinated by them and by another now almost impossible to find film about homicidal queerness called WINDOWS (1980), starring Talia Shire as the victim of an obsessive dyke stalker.

WINDOWS got terrible reviews, caught gay rights flak, and everyone seems glad to have forgotten it today. Everyone, that is... but old Erich, who's still traumatized by seeing it reviewed on some local Philadelphia news show back in 1980 (they called it depressing and hateful - I was instantly thrilled).

I guess it's easy to sum up a decade as being sinful or doomed by its propensity to abuse newly found freedoms--especially in the US., where even the backlashes have backlashes--so for every starry-eyed examination of the polyester scene there's going to be three pieces of nihilistic dread-mongering like Richard Brooks' LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977).

Out of circulation for a long while (presumably over music rights) there's no denying the power of a film that dares to star Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld--two of the most brilliant comedic actresses of the era--only to proceed to throw them to the wolves with no regard for audience emotional endurance, making every single guy in their lives an unrepentant sleazy jerk, including dad and brothers-in-law, and leaving the girls no place to turn but between the sheets with any poisonous ogre who cuts them a line.

GOODBAR's best scenes involve Keaton getting off over her fear and ambivalence towards Richard Gere as a coked-up rentboy mix of ROCKY (1976) and John Travolta in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977). But for all his kinetic air-punches, Gere's character is still a stereotype of Vinnie Barbarino barbarousness. Meanwhile, Keaton's so good you want to abduct her in a white van and drive her over to a better film. But you can't, and the only glimmer of light is an in-joke scene where she picks up Richard Gere via small talk about Mario Puzo's The Godfather (which of course, Keaton co-starred in as Pacino's wife).

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER  is a film that too many people--including my mom who took us to see it as children at the drive-in--thought was a dancing rags-to-self discovering class hero epic like ROCKY or BAD NEWS BEARS (1976) and instead turned out to be depressing and way-too-sleazy for children, no matter how many kids birthday parties had danced to the album.

The main drag is Travolta's posse of youthful Italian-American hoodlums hanging out under the Verrazano bridge, balling their collective whore/gang deb played achingly well by Donna Pescow, and generally fuming with working class self-loathing and thick New Yoahkka accents. I haven't seen FEVER since that night with mom at the drive-in but I remember how much I hated all the characters and shuddered in sympathetic horror at the sad sexual desperation and abuse of poor Donna Pescow... and I remember only one line "Ah, they're spics, they're greasin' up the floah." a remark made against a competing Latin dance couple. Now what does that tell you about the power of evil to endure in an innocent child's memory? We all grew up wanting to be DAMIEN: OMEN II (1978) or have Patty Duke for our mother in LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976), but we didn't want to do it in fucking Brooklyn, especially goddamned Bay Ridge! Yeeeeesh. I still hate Brooklyn, even though I'm sitting in it right now! At least it's Greenpoint, or Fort Greene, I can never tell them apart, but not because of reasons you think, playa. That's racist.

Of course by now you know I'm a sensitive soul, so please sympathize when I tell you that one lazy Sunday in the very early 1980's I caught the last 30 minutes of MR. GOODBAR by accident at a friend's house.  I was around 13 or so, and I was alone (my buddy was out mowing a lawn), I thought it was ANNIE HALL at first, recognizing Keaton, which I'd never seen but heard was great. Of course it was not the case.

I was so traumatized I couldn't even look at a Playboy for six months.

Seeing the film in full for the first time last night--some 30 years later--made me realize it's still way too shocking for my poor system. Sexual violence is something much better digested when unrealistic, as in bad, as in fake-looking.  Little winks of Brechtian narrative disruption do much to relieve anxiety in the viewer, or at least me, but when full-on Hollywood muscle is applied to giving you a strobe-light asphyxiation panic attack then Mr. Brooks, you should be ashamed! This nasty little ending traumatized me in 1981 and it traumatizes me now, worse than REQUIEM FOR A DREAM which used a similar eye-rape strobe technique and left me feeling similarly in need of a Xanax, which I didn't have. Where's the cinematic Xanax for our come-down for this daring but misogynistic and undeserved ending, Mr. Brooks?  Even Buck had a Ratzo! Give Keaton a break, like a sympathetic girlfriend who isn't a knife-wielding psychotic. Why not give her a friendly, protective dog? She's a beloved saint at her school for the deaf, but the one time she fails to show up on time, all the kids instantly hate her. The minute the one good guy in her life starts to seem human enough to waken her from her nympho slumber, he starts acting as shady as Jackie Earle Haley in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006). It's like Brooks was still angry the censors wouldn't let him castrate Paul Newman at the end of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1963) and he's been castrating us all by proxy ever since.

At any rate, back in the day, as I well recall, GOODBAR was on everyone's lips (adults had all read the book) as the cautionary buzzword that kept 70's singles ever alert for signs of derangement in their take-home projects, razors in their Halloween apples if you will. A Goodbar was slang for a dangerous date ("watch out for the Goodbars!") that we kids didn't understand, associating it with the candy bar and wondering if it had something to do with getting in cars with strangers or accepting opened candy bars (before the Tylenol scare of 1982 for example, there were very few protective coverings on bottles). But that was the attitude of the time: safety and security took a backseat to getting your kicks and rocks off. There were no 24/7 hall monitors, no racing to pick the kids up from school rather than letting them walk home alone through the spooky park. The complete reverse of how it is now, when all our liberties are slowly stripped away and we're glad to get rid of them, tightening our security systems until we choke on boredom and claustrophobic anxiety.

Long unavailable on DVD, GOODBAR is currently on Netflix streaming and see it if you can, before they yank it down again, but just remember that this film really should have a tag like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie," or in this case, only the first sparks of the early 1980's anti-sexual backlash hysteria. What it's not is what the ads and stills all promise, a dramedy where a girl runs with a dangerous crowd in pursuit of herself, and then probably winds up with Gerard Butler or some nice Jewish boy, and her klutzy best friend cries at her wedding and winds up with a caterer.

 In 1977 things were still good. The coke was flowing and the hospitals had yet to fill up with heart murmurs. We still had some time to sleep around and not fear the AIDS reaper. But when the change finally came, we were ready. We were exhausted. We were sorry. We  learned to be politically correct and gay-friendly at first just because we hated the haters more than the hated, and because America naturally sticks up for the underdog. We also cleaned up Times Square. Now we can't dance or smoke in NYC bars, and we can't drink outside in brown paper bags or smoke cigars in the theater lobby. Everyone's 'happy.' And no matter how hard we looked--and still look--through the trash of 42nd Street, we never did, and never will, find Plato's Retreat. When I finally did stumble into that orgy I'd always wanted it was Halloween night of 2003, and before I could strip off my tie I mumbled an excuse and ran outside to smoke a cigarette, panicky, hand shaking as I lit in a way that would have made a Corleone wince, then ran home on shaky legs to call my sponsor. Vomiting guidos in shitty costumes splayed before me like a gauntlet, I leapt over them and ran from it all.

God help me, I ran to "freedom."

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