Every couple of years I mention Frank Perry‘s still-inaccessible Play It As It Lays. I’ve been writing about it for 15 years, and you still can’t stream it. Based on a Joan Didion’s 1970 novel, this angsty, slowly-sinking-into-the-Hollywood-swamp thing has always been an offbeat feminist film, but somehow it never got sufficient credit for that. Tuesday Weld‘s Maria (pronounced “Mar-EYE-ah”) is a wealthy gloomhead, but she’s constantly skeptical of the men in her life as well as the male-dominated film industry. Mocking, dismissive, disengaged. I wonder how today’s heightened, enlightened industry consciousness would process a remake? The #MeToo community would approve. A fair number of critics cheered when it opened in the fall of ’72, but it only made a million bucks.
