Film review

  • Looking for Mr Goodbar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Brooks (1977)

    Looking for Mr Goodbar is part of this month’s BFI programme commemorating the Scala cinema in King’s Cross and helping to promote a new documentary about it.  Jane Giles, a programmer at the Scala for the last ten years of its life as a film house (1983-93), curator of the BFI season and co-director with Ali Catterall of the documentary, introduced this screening of Richard Brooks’s bleak drama.  Giles began by asking a full house in NFT2 for a show of hands on four questions.  Who had seen the new documentary?  Or had ever seen a film at the Scala?  (Plenty of hands went up, roughly equal numbers both times.)  Or had seen Looking for Mr Goodbar previously?  (Fewer hands.)  In answer to the last question – who saw Looking for Mr Goodbar at the Scala? – only two hands went up.  Jane Giles seemed impressed there were as many as that because, she explained, there’d only ever been two Scala screenings of Brooks’s film (one in July 1984, the other July 1985).  Giles also acknowledged that it wasn’t typical Scala fare.  The full title of her documentary is Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits.  The place made its name showing, as well as various cult curiosities, sexploitation, horror, kung fu and (what’s now termed) LGBTQIA+ cinema.  That Looking for Mr Goodbar came to be screened at the Scala at all is a clue to its split personality.  The film is politically reactionary but sexually explicit.  It’s misogynistic yet foregrounds female sexual appetite and behaviour – as the storyline dictates – to a degree very unusual in a mainstream Hollywood picture of the time.

    Brooks’s screenplay is an adaptation of Judith Rossner’s 1975 best-seller of the same name.  Rossner’s novel was inspired by a real-life crime – the murder, at the start of 1973, of a twenty-eight-year-old primary school teacher called Roseann Quinn.  Since 1969, Quinn – a native New Yorker, raised a Catholic – had taught in a Bronx school for deaf children.  In her private life, she developed the habit of meeting men in local singles bars and taking them back to her studio apartment in West 72nd Street.  She was stabbed to death there apparently by one such pick-up (John Wayne Wilson committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial for Quinn’s murder).  As a young teenager, Roseann Quinn spent a year in hospital after a back operation for scoliosis, which left her with a slight limp.  In Judith Rossner’s novel, the sex drive of Theresa Dunn, Quinn’s fictional alter ego, is portrayed as psychologically aberrant because sex is all that she wants from a man – sex unaccompanied by love.  Rossner makes use of Roseann Quinn’s medical history to elaborate Theresa’s abnormality.  As a young child, she had polio; her parents were too preoccupied with Theresa’s siblings to notice, until the damage was done, that muscle weakness resulting from polio was causing her spine to curve.  The scoliosis surgery has left Theresa with, as well as a limp, a scar on her back that’s virtually the mark of Cain.  Theresa’s first adult relationship is with her college professor, Martin Engle.  She’s emotionally committed to, as well as sexually excited by, him but Professor Engle, a married man, doesn’t reciprocate that commitment.  Insufficiently loved as a child and used by her first lover, Theresa not only gives up post-Engle on the idea of receiving love but is also incapable of showing it – except, in a highly circumscribed form, to the deaf kids to whom she devotes her working hours.

    Whereas Rossner slightly backdates her protagonist’s murder to the first day of the 1970s, Richard Brooks moves the Roseann Quinn timeframe forward:  the movie’s Theresa Dunn dies in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1977. This time adjustment, though not large, is significant.  Although Rossner’s story feels like a cautionary tale, Theresa, as a case-cum-character-study, is individual enough; she doesn’t come across chiefly as representative of a generation or social type.  If that’s also true of the film it’s only to the extent that the actress playing Theresa – Diane Keaton – had very recently emerged as a highly individual screen presence:  Woody Allen’s Annie Hall was released in April 1977, just six months before Goodbar opened in American cinemas.  Brooks’s script and direction, however, present Theresa – emphatically – as a casualty of the permissive society and second-wave feminism.  The repeated shots of seedy New York streets at night – neon signs advertising sex shows and porn movies – might seem to echo Taxi Driver (1976) but the cityscape’s infernal quality in Martin Scorsese’s film is seen from, and exaggerated by, Travis Bickle’s disturbed perspective.  In Looking for Mr Goodbar, New York’s nocturnal possibilities are a magnet to Theresa Dunn and the abandon-all-hope point of view is the director’s.  When Brooks inserts a television news report of an anniversary celebration of the women’s liberation movement, the male reporter’s tone of voice is sarcastic and disparaging.  Theresa goes to a party – hosted by her sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) and Katherine’s latest man – which starts with a screening of blue movies and culminates in drug-fuelled group sex.  Brooks makes his anti-heroine’s spinal condition hereditary:  she feels she can’t risk motherhood and asks a doctor to sterilise her.  That change to her condition in the novel might seem to dilute the film’s anti-permissive stance – you’d expect Brooks to show Theresa having sex followed by an abortion.  He doesn’t quite forego the opportunity, though:  airline hostess Katherine (who, unlike her sister, romanticises each one of her short-lived Mr Rights) terminates a pregnancy.

    The only one of Jane Giles’s questions that my hand went up for was the third – I saw Looking for Mr Goodbar on its original British release, in early 1978.  The film’s clashing elements, evident enough then, are all the more conspicuous now.  With 2020s vision, Brooks’s disapproving but persisting description of Theresa’s sex life seems more than ever like having it both ways, censuring and titillating at the same time.  The picture, while condemning sexual licence, exploits the permissiveness of New Hollywood:  there’s plenty of bare flesh in evidence, female and male.  (Goodbar fared well at the box office.)  It’s also more striking in long retrospect that a movie from a major studio (Paramount) was apparently denouncing feminism so soon after women’s lib had entered the cultural mainstream.  The protagonist’s harshest critic in the film is her blue-collar father (Richard Kiley).  A choleric loudhailer whenever he addresses Theresa, he’s blind to the promiscuity of Katherine, his favoured daughter, as well as maudlin and determinedly wrong-headed about his own family pedigree.  Mr Dunn is such a ridiculous pain in the neck that he’s wholly ineffective as a spokesman for decent traditional values, so deluded that he’s a feeble representative of patriarchy.  Looking for Mr Goodbar has aged typically in visual terms for a Hollywood product of its era.  William Fraker’s cinematography was Oscar-nominated in 1978; except for the external nighttime sequences, the film’s palette has decayed into the pink-and-ginger colour scheme of plenty of its contemporaries.

    You get used to that but the film is hard to watch both because it’s grim and because it’s bad.  Jane Giles in her introduction quoted Pauline Kael’s dismissal of Goodbar as ‘a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax’ and it is a dog’s breakfast.  A few examples … The narrative occasionally switches into what’s soon revealed to be Theresa’s fantasy or nightmare.  These sequences have no impact:  her actual life is painted so garishly that her imagination is tamer than reality.  When she first meets Tony (Richard Gere), who proves to be her most aggressively persistent sex partner, she’s in a bar with a drink and a hard-copy edition of The Godfather.  Italian-American Tony comments on the book, says he’s seen the movie, mentions Al Pacino:  if Tony doesn’t realise he’s talking to a woman incarnated by the actress who played Pacino’s wife in The Godfather films, Goodbar audiences certainly did and do.  This encounter got a deserved laugh in NFT2 although that’s surely not what Brooks intended.  It’s true The Godfather features in Judith Rossner’s novel but Mario Puzo’s mega-seller had only recently been published according to Rossner’s timeframe; by 1976, when Theresa and Tony meet, it had become a much larger cultural phenomenon.  The retention of Puzo’s book seems to present it – bizarrely – as an emblem of the societal malaise that Brooks is critiquing.  Why didn’t he take advantage of his own adjustment of the timeframe to have Theresa reading fiction more apposite to his agenda – something like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (first published in 1973)?  Numerous classroom scenes illustrate what a dedicated, effective teacher Theresa is:  it’s hard to know if these are meant to give an extra tragic dimension to (what Brooks sees as) her fatal flaw or make us wonder what else she needs if her working life is so fulfilling, or what.  After she and Tony have snorted cocaine, he gives Theresa a Quaalude to bring her down, she sleeps in next morning and arrives late for school.  When she arrives, her class of eight year olds – as a disapproving colleague reveals to Theresa – is running riot.  The colleague’s action in letting them run riot seems no less reprehensible than Theresa’s sleep-in.

    When Theresa apologises to the kids, some of them are disapproving too; in expressing their disapproval, they start to overact – a tendency epidemic in the film’s adult cast.  It afflicts all the main men in Theresa’s life:  Alan Feinstein as Professor Engle; Richard Gere, who’s uncharacteristically hyperactive as Tony; William Atherton as James, the sexually inhibited social worker who tries and fails to make a good woman of Theresa; Tom Berenger, as Gary, who eventually murders her.  Gary lives with his older gay boyfriend, who has persuaded him to drag up for New Year’s Eve; nearly all his female garb disappears in a street scuffle.  Furiously ashamed and upset, Gary puts his own clothes back on, dumps his lover and goes to the bar where he meets Theresa.  When they go back to her apartment, he tells her he has a pregnant wife in Florida but they go to bed anyway; when Gary can’t get an erection and Theresa tells him it doesn’t matter, he decides she’s impugning his manhood, rapes her then stabs her to death.  The attack is shown in strobe lighting – the strobe was a Christmas present to Theresa from James.  What seemed a puzzling choice of gift at the time is now explained:  it comes in handy for Richard Brooks’s big finish.  I had to look away during this, of course (there’s another difference between 1978 and 2024) – as I also sometimes did watching Richard Kiley.  That was a pointless exercise since I couldn’t avert my ears as well as my eyes.  In a keen contest, Kiley’s performance as Theresa’s father is the worst of the lot.

    The main actresses fare better.  Another of the film’s retrospective points of interest is watching Diane Keaton in what proved to be such an untypical role.  Keaton supplies the only human interest in the gruesome saga and, using her great comedy instincts, water-in-the-desert moments of humour.  Yet her aforementioned individuality, although it makes Looking for Mr Goodbar easier to sit through, also gets in the way; it feels increasingly wrong for a character whose fate is predetermined.  Katherine isn’t much of a role but Tuesday Weld (who received the film’s only other Oscar nomination, for Supporting Actress) is empathic and animated.  The sisters’ mother is even less of a role and Priscilla Pointer can’t do anything with it.  (In 1976-77 Pointer cornered the market in parents whose main job is to watch on aghast:  she was Amy Irving’s mother in Brian de Palma’s Carrie.)  What else to recommend?  There’s a good selection of contemporary pop on the soundtrack, including Thelma Houston’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’; this is supported by Artie Kane’s original score, whose muted melancholy has a more forgiving tone than Richard Brooks’s direction.  The film’s intrinsic merits are, frankly, few – but Looking for Mr Goodbar fascinates now as a 1970s Hollywood artefact.

    13 January 2024

  • Priscilla

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sofia Coppola (2023)

    It begins with small bare feet, the toenails painted coral pink, moving through the deep pile of a colour-coordinated carpet.  The camera watches a hand apply false lashes to a close-up eye before a more extended tour of décor – furniture, ornaments and other stuff that may have cost plenty but still look tacky.  Writer-director Sofia Coppola’s film-making has often been fascinated by the surfaces and textures of the trappings of affluence but perhaps never more so than in Priscilla (though I’ve not seen Marie Antoinette (2006)).

    The screenplay is based on Elvis and Me, a 1985 memoir written (with Sandra Harmon) by Priscilla Presley, who served as executive producer on the film.  Although you don’t expect a conventional biopic from Coppola, Priscilla‘s early scenes hardly subvert the genre.  In 1959, fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu is living on a military base in West Germany with her mother and stepfather, who’s a US air force captain.  A chance meeting with one American soldier leads to an invitation to a party hosted by another – twenty-four-year-old Elvis Presley, halfway through his two-year military service.  At the party, Elvis and Priscilla get talking; soon after, and despite her parents’ concerns, they start dating.  She’s bereft when he returns to America the following year but Elvis doesn’t forget Priscilla.  In 1962, he gets back in touch, tells her he loves her and asks that she come to live at Graceland.  After a transatlantic trip during which she meets his family and entourage and does drugs with Elvis for the first time, Priscilla returns to Germany but persuades her mother and stepfather to let her move to Memphis long term.  Elvis assures the Beaulieus that he’ll enrol Priscilla in a decent Catholic school to obtain the few credits she still needs for high-school graduation, and he’s as good as his word.  On graduation day, he readily agrees to Priscilla’s request that he stay away from the ceremony so as not to upstage her class.  Diploma in hand, Priscilla emerges from the ceremony to find the nuns who taught her getting their picture taken with Elvis.

    Things still happen from this point on in Priscilla – which continues through to 1973 and the end of the title character’s six-year marriage to Elvis – yet it all but comes to a stop once she’s ensconced, and entrapped, at Graceland.  Coppola’s preoccupation with the place’s house rules, its totems and taboos, is nearly all-consuming.  Priscilla’s life there is described minutely but barely dramatised at all.  Sequence after sequence illustrates her bird-in-a-gilded-cage isolation.  I’m not sure why Coppola has her cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd – just as in their collaboration on The Beguiled (2013) – half-light so many of the images but you  can still see that these are artfully composed; even so, you get impatient with their making the same point repeatedly.  The Graceland ménage is nearly the reverse of the set-up in The Beguiled, whose action takes place in a girls’ school that plays host to, and virtually takes prisoner, a soldier wounded in the American Civil War:  Elvis’s male pals/acolytes are less individual, though, than the earlier film’s teenage girls.  When he’s in residence, Elvis has Priscilla model dresses to an audience of him and his hangers-on, and decrees what she can and can’t wear.  When he’s away in Hollywood making movie musicals, Priscilla is left to read in papers and magazines about his alleged romances with co-stars, from Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas (1964) to Nancy Sinatra in Speedway (1968).  In a rare access of autonomy, Priscilla turns up in Los Angeles to confront Elvis about the former liaison but he soon sends her back to Graceland.

    Priscilla in the film is more emphatically a child bride than she was in reality: her actual height is 5’ 4” and Elvis was just under six feet tall; Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla, is 5’ 1” and Jacob Elordi’s Elvis 6’ 5”.  When they marry and stand beside their wedding cake, topped by miniature bride and groom figures, you realise what Priscilla has kept reminding you of.  In Michael Apted’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), prodigious hairdos sometimes threatened to overpower even Sissy Spacek – and Loretta Lynn got out incomparably more than Priscilla‘s young protagonist.  The colossal dyed-black beehive prescribed by Elvis weighs Priscilla down and compounds her lack of freedom.  She’s all the more burdened when her diminutive body is carrying a baby.  (On the subject of encumbrance, it’s a relief – probably for Jacob Elordi as well as the viewer – that the film ends before Elvis’s alarming weight gain in his last years.)  Yet in spite of a height difference that often looks cartoonish, both main actors do well, especially Cailee Spaeny.

    I had seen Spaeny before but didn’t recognise her from her TV role in HBO’s Mare of Easttown (2021).  When she first appears in Priscilla, I assumed I was watching an adolescent actress who’d turn into the leading lady a few years later.  Actually in her mid-twenties, Spaeny is remarkably credible as a fourteen-year-old – and ages very convincingly over the film’s fourteen-year timeframe.  In the opening scenes, whisked into the orbit of someone she has idolised along with the rest of her generation, the heroine is in an incredulous daze.  Sequestered in Graceland, she still seems like an Elvis fan though a frustrated and suspicious one, too:  Spaeny’s ability to suggest what Priscilla’s thinking – in a situation that annuls her intelligence – gives the film what little dramatic tension it has.

    Elvis rules the roost – but roost is the word:  he spends less time in the film on stage or in the recording studio than he does in bed.  He occasionally reads spiritual handbooks there; more often, he’s doped or at least dopey – Priscilla has to work hard to wake him up with the news that she has gone into labour.  Despite this demeaning conception of Elvis, Jacob Elordi makes him oddly likeable (Elordi managed something similar with his character in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, also against the odds).  Although Elvis’s lifestyle is decidedly not grounded in reality, Elordi looks and sounds less artificial than Austin Butler did in Elvis (or in as much of Baz Luhrmann’s picture as I could sit through).  Elvis is playing the piano when Priscilla arrives at his party at the start.  Later, in the company of Priscilla and his laddish retinue, he watches himself in musical action on TV – but keeps averting his eyes while Priscilla grins and the boys whoop and holler at the screen.  On the whole, Coppola is intent on presenting an Elvis Presley divested of the musical and performing qualities that made him Elvis Presley.  The soundtrack features no Elvis numbers but a selection of familiar, approximately contemporary pop tunes – which works well enough until Elvis’s voice gets to be conspicuous by its absence.

    The movie’s scrupulous inertia falters in the closing stages.  Priscilla’s abandonment of the beehive for a freer hairstyle heralds her journey to relative independence in the early 1970s.  She and Elvis lead increasingly separate lives – Priscilla mostly in California, where she has karate lessons and takes a shine to her instructor.  But it’s Sofia Coppola who suddenly seems anxious for the Presleys’ marriage to end.  She starts inserting signals that Elvis is spiralling down through substance abuse – pills on his bedside table, an inebriated attempt to have sex with his wife that’s clumsily unsuccessful.  Priscilla escapes from this and from him.  Announcing that she’s filing for divorce, she abruptly turns feminist:  ‘You’re losing me to a life of my own’.  At the last moment, even Coppola’s carefully considered soundtrack choices break down.  Most of these are melodically apt but with lyrics no more than obliquely relevant to what we’re seeing at the time.  In contrast, Priscilla walks out of Graceland to the accompaniment of ‘I Will Always Love You’ (the original Dolly Parton version).  She then gets into her car and heads towards the gates of the property.  Priscilla has had so little agency in the film it comes as a surprise that she learned to drive.

    10 January 2024

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