Irving Kershner (1970)

On its original release Loving was seen as distinctively sympathetic in its treatment of American middle-class mores and problems.  A few years on, it’s still a striking film but I found myself liking George Segal’s performance much more than Irving Kershner’s direction, which distributes compassion unevenly among the characters, or the screenplay by Don Devlin, which is thin and tendentious.  Devlin adapted Loving from a 1968 novel by J M Ryan, called Brooks Wilson Ltd.   Brooks (Segal) is a comfortably off commercial artist and a family man.  He’s nevertheless both professionally and domestically dissatisfied, and approaching a crisis point in both spheres.  He has a beautiful, intelligent wife Selma (Eva Marie Saint) and two young daughters (Lorraine Cullen and Cheryl Bucher), who are exuberant but, for Hollywood screen kids, unusually devoid of cuteness.  Brooks is also having an unfulfilling and stagnating affair with Grace (Janis Young), whose parents Brooks and Selma know well.  Because Brooks won’t commit to their relationship, Grace decides to leave for a tour of Europe.

In order to secure a lucrative contract, Brooks is forced to curry favour with Lepridon (Sterling Hayden), the owner of a truck firm.  In the climax to the film, at the bon voyage party for Grace at her parents’ home, Brooks learns that he’s landed the Lepridon contract.  He tries to speak to Grace, to persuade her to stay, and, when he fails to do so, gets drunk and makes love to Nelly (Nancie Phillips), a friend’s wife who’s been giving Brooks the eye throughout the movie.  Grace’s father has a closed-circuit television system, enabling him to watch what’s going on in the various parts of his large residence.  Brooks’s and Nellie’s love-making in an outhouse flashes onto one of the screens.  The party guests watch absorbedly until Brooks sees the camera and desperately attempts to stop the show.  Nellie’s husband Will (David Doyle) tries to strangle first Brooks, then Nellie, then – after failing in both cases – has a punch-up with Brooks.  Selma at first tries to drive away.  She then gets out of the car, goes to her husband, and hits him repeatedly.  Loving ends with a shot of the couple shivering and sobbing in the driveway of their house – sad, disillusioned but still together.

The film was released during a spate of pictures that not only satirised but often gratuitously mocked the American bourgeoisie.  In Loving, Brooks and Selma can see what’s wrong with the way they live and despise themselves for it.  Irving Kershner and Don Devlin allow the viewer to condemn the fatuousness of their social group’s rituals and aspirations while still feeling sympathy with characters shown as trapped in (and oppressed by) their lifestyle, rather than as decadent or cynical or shallow.  Cuddling with Brooks in the back of a car, Nellie, who’s already sozzled, announces that she wants another drink.  Brooks gets out of the car to go up to the house then realises he’s not wearing any trousers.  Only when Nellie says, ‘Don’t be so middle-class’, is he galvanised into going ahead with the drinks order as he is.  Brooks has very mixed feelings about the Lepridon contract.  It will provide the money for a new and bigger house but he worries that will further enmesh him in material obligations and imperatives.  This makes him unhappy because, although he wants further professional success, he’s seeking artistic achievement more than monetary rewards.

Brooks is charming and clumsy at home but we see that, as well as being unfaithful, he’s neglecting his wife and children for the sake of his work in his studio.  We also see that his self-disgust (possibly fed by movies less intelligent than Loving) is excessive.  We’re encouraged to like Brooks and respect Selma, who is dedicated to bringing up the children and loving her husband as much as he’ll let her.  Where the film goes wrong, I think, is in showing Brooks and Selma as infinitely more self-aware and admirable than anyone else – there’s scarcely another likeable adult character in evidence.  All the other party guests are the cardboard, materialist contemptibles familiar from the movies from which Loving, in its treatment of the Wilsons, differentiates itself.  This may be partly the result of Kershner and Devlin concentrating largely  on Brooks and Selma but the couple don’t come across as fake or silly even when they’re socialising superficially with people all of whom do come across that way.   Lepridon has lines like (to Brooks), ‘You don’t look like an artist – artists are effeminate’.  He swears and swaggers then thanks Brooks for his Christmas card:  ‘So few these days remember it’s a religious festival’.  Brooks’s work colleagues are sketched in as sex maniacs, hypocrites or sycophants.  Old Mr Kramm (Edgar Stehli), a tiresome busybody of a neighbour, complains that Brooks and Selma don’t keep up appearances:  ‘I have to sit and look at your lousy house.  In the winter, you never shovel your snow away.  In the summer, you let crab grass grow all over.  Look, I’ve got the name of a good, cheap house painter if you’re interested …’   Brooks’s reply (‘I’m not interested:  I’ve got the name of a good, cheap house-mover’) comes as a relief.

Irving Kershner orchestrates the big party scenes well, even though they tend to be shallowly sarcastic.  Stereotyped guests – a camp Englishman, a genially insincere host, a pseudo-intellectual – swap sexual innuendo and generally pointless remarks.  The partygoers dance and chat automatically and don’t appear to be enjoying themselves.  As the guests gather round the screen to watch the outhouse sex, it’s an almost literal expression of the current movie convention of exposing bourgeois hypocrisy and other failings to largely middle-class audiences.  Yet there are a few kinder notes too.  In the outhouse, Brooks and Nellie find some children’s records of nursery rhymes and play them while making love in a cot.  The simple, touching quality in George Segal’s face as Brooks listens to the nursery rhymes takes the derisive edge off this image of infantilism.

Irving Kershner hadn’t had a commercial success when he made this film, which probably increased his anxiety to hold audience attention and made him decide that satirical treatment was his best hope of doing so.  (In the event, Loving still didn’t do well at the box office.)   Besides, the script is so sparse and the action so limited that the film does need padding.  There’s only one instance when the viewer is cued for a laugh (the children, playing in the hall, hear a crash outside and announce, ‘Mommy – Daddy’s home’) but each scene makes its point – usually just the one point – too neatly.   At least, though, that means you enjoy exceptions to the rule, such as a sequence where the Wilsons are looking at a prospective new house whose middle-aged owners are splitting up.  The shame and sorrow of the wife, who shows the Wilsons round, is affecting.  Her marriage has broken down; her husband seems distant and uncommunicative.  These things are presented matter-of-factly but not judgmentally.

George Segal makes Loving ­­– makes it likeable too.  He exudes essential decency and funny human frailty.  His playing is simple and unflamboyant.  You admire the clever actor at the same as sympathising with his character.  Brooks Wilson is acutely aware of his faults but doesn’t express this in a turgid, verbose way (the way, for example, the MP in the current ITV drama The Nearly Man does).  Wandering up and down the courtyard in his underpants, Segal makes Brooks amusing and pathetic without obviously aiming for either quality.  He’s marvellous too at suggesting considerable suppressed anger and perplexity – and magnetic when Brooks is pitching for the Lepridon contract.  He looks into the camera, recognising the indignity of his grovelling and the futility of his reward if the grovelling succeeds.

[1975]