Herbert Ross (1977)

Plenty of Hollywood (melo)dramas pivot on the idea of a single, crucial event in the past that determined the future direction of a character’s life.  This film, from a screenplay by Arthur Laurents, is unusually explicit by announcing the mechanism in its title – surprisingly explicit when the mechanism is such a cliché.   Also unusual is that, as far as I could tell from the credits and can see from the Wikipedia and IMDb entries for The Turning Point, there’s no acknowledgement of the film’s debt to the John van Druten stage play and subsequent movie Old Acquaintance (1943).  In the latter, Kit Marlowe (Bette Davis) is a writer whose professional success stirs up the resentment of Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins), Kit’s best friend since girlhood;  some years later, the closeness between the childless Kit and Millie’s daughter becomes another bone of contention.  The daughter’s name is Deirdre; Kit’s pet name for her is ‘DeDe’.  There are loud echoes of both these things in The Turning Point and calling the grudge-bearing character Deedee is a heavy hint that she’s a scion of the Old Acquaintance clan.  Pauline Kael found the resemblance so strong that her review of  Herbert Ross’s film was called ‘Shouldn’t Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?’

The literary context of the van Druten material is replaced here by the world of classical ballet.  Twenty years ago, Deedee (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) were competing for the lead in a new ballet of Anna Karenina; then came the turning point.  As DeeDee ruefully puts it to Emma, ‘I got pregnant and you got nineteen curtain calls’.  Deedee gave up a career in dance to marry Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and raise a family in Oklahoma City.  They now have three teenage children and run a local dance school.  Emma has been a première danseuse ever since she played Anna Karenina, although her long run at the top is approaching its end.   The film starts with the American Ballet Company (based on American Ballet Theatre), of which Emma’s a leading light, giving a performance in Oklahoma City.   Deedee’s elder daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne) is an aspiring dancer.  Emma, who’s her godmother, suggests that she join the company at their base in New York.  Deedee, Emilia and her younger brother Ethan, who’s also into ballet, travel there.  Emilia enjoys a meteoric rise to classical dance stardom, increasing the tensions between her mother and godmother to the point of a physical fight one night in a deserted Lincoln Center.   The two women’s slapping and hair-pulling, needless to say, are not only climactic but cathartic.  (The script’s construction is sometimes cavalier in its crudeness:  the tensions between Emma and Deedee, after being pointed up early on, are left in store until they’re needed for the big finish.)

I saw The Turning Point around the time of its original release and remembered it as being more trashily enjoyable than I found it now.  Herbert Ross, whose career as a choreographer began with ABT before he moved to Broadway and Hollywood, directed; his wife, Nora Kaye, a famous ballerina, co-produced with Ross (and Laurents).  The film-makers’ love of ballet is reflected principally in two ways, somewhat conflicting but both tiresome.  First, the artistic milieu of the movie isn’t just treated reverently; the Rosses and Laurents seem to assume that it confers depth.  Second, the film attempts to present ballet as wholesomely American – more specifically, as a suitable occupation for male heterosexuals.  When Emilia goes to New York, she soon has an affair with Yuri, the company’s brilliant leading man.   Yuri is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, in his screen acting debut; nearly everything Baryshnikov does is strong yet his presence illustrates the fundamental weaknesses of the movie.  For one thing, his masculinity – on stage and off – is enough in itself to dispose instantly of any idea that men who do ballet must be cissies – but, in order to ram the point home, the script makes Yuri an amiable, incorrigible tomcat.  All this renders the character of Deedee’s son Ethan (Phillip Sanders), who does baseball as well as ballet and talks and behaves like a jock, as otiose as it’s embarrassing.  In the second half of The Turning Point, Herbert Ross puts together excerpts featuring actual ABT artists, most notably Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, and the dancer-characters in the movie.   Ross rightly recognises Baryshnikov’s solo from Le Corsaire as a highlight:  the problem is that it’s so good it not only eclipses the preceding dances but just about obliterates the brittle story that Ross is telling.

Baryshnikov acts easily, unlike Leslie Browne, who plays the doe-eyed Emilia.   Browne joined ABT in 1976 and became a principal ten years later.  As a dancer here, she’s pleasing but unexciting, although her graceful impersonality is an effective counterpoint to Baryshnikov’s dynamic flamboyance when she partners him in the pas de deux from Don Quixote (the John Curry music, as I think of it).  As a screen actress, though, Browne is inexpressive and awkward.  Emilia’s fortunes in love and dance occupy too much screen time anyway; with Browne in the role, these parts of the movie become merely boring.  There is plenty more bad acting in The Turning Point and not just from famous dancers like Antoinette Sibley.  Some of the proper actors – Martha Scott as the company manager, Daniel Levans as a ‘comically’ egocentric choreographer – aren’t that hot either.  As Emma, Anne Bancroft certainly looks the part – she’s spectacularly, ascetically skinny.   Her playing of the role has a prideful quality, though:  that connects with Emma’s attention-seeking quality – charisma on tap – but Bancroft’s performance lacks shadings and surprises.   The character of the anti-arty-farty middle daughter in Deedee’s family is as obviously drawn as that of the brother although the girl is rather better played, by Lisa Lucas.  As a grande dame of the ballet world, the elderly Alexandra Danilova has a vivid, rather appealing deliberateness.

The best acting, even if that’s damning with faint praise, comes from Shirley MacLaine and Tom Skerritt.  Watching Deedee and Wayne together, you see how a marriage and a largely happy family life has continued over the years but you see too a persistent tension, born of Deedee’s guilty regret.   It’s not that her disappointment at giving up a dance career is rampant – more that she can’t prevent Wayne from knowing the ending of that career has never stopped mattering to her.  Tom Skerritt may be advantaged by the part of Wayne being underwritten but he gives a lovely, sensitive performance.  Shirley MacLaine doesn’t have that advantage, and her clothes and hairdo underline Deedee’s provincial deprivations too heavily, but she’s tenaciously truthful:  once Emma and Deedee have had their set-to, we’re supposed to believe they’ve got all the bad feelings out of their system; what’s believable are the slight suggestions in MacLaine that Deedee hasn’t.   There’s a particularly good scene between MacLaine and Skerritt when Deedee admits to Wayne what Emma’s accused her of – wanting to have Wayne’s child and to marry him to prove to herself that he wasn’t gay.   Wayne says quietly that he always knew that’s what she wanted, and that he needed to prove it to himself too.   This is one of the rare moments in The Turning Point when issues around the sexuality of male dancers are presented subtly.  I didn’t take what Wayne said here to mean that he’d been worried about having homosexual feelings – rather that the prevailing assumptions of the time inevitably caused him to wonder.   There’s one other, somewhat similar moment that registers convincingly – when Emilia comes home from a night with Yuri and tells her mother not to worry because she’s on the pill.  Shirley MacLaine’s face expresses Deedee’s hurt frustration that she didn’t have that option twenty years back.

27 June 2012