All But Unwatchable

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After reviewing Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (HBO, now streaming), I began to poke around her filmography and consider her less successful films. I wound up focusing on Richard Quine‘s Sex and the Single Girl (’64), a strenuous, tedious sex farce that nonetheless became a commercial hit. God forgive me but I read the Wiki page, watched the trailer and read two or three reviews.

Wood played a mythical version of “Sex and the Single Girl” author Helen Gurley Brown, who was 42 in actuality while Wood’s version is a couple of decades younger and on the prim and proper side. Tony Curtis played Bob Weston, a reporter for a scandal magazine looking to expose Brown as “a 23 year-old virgin” and therefore a pretender in matters of sexual experience.

The below promotional photo of Curtis and Wood (they both seem to be thinking “oh, dear God…the lack of modesty!”) was aimed at lowest-common-denominator prudes circa 1964, and therefore reflected a safe marketing strategy. It’s nonetheless infuriating if you think about it for five or six seconds.


Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood in a promotional pose for Sex and the Single Girl (’64).

Forget the plot line — if a 39 year-old hound dog (Curtis was born in ’25) was reading “Sex and the Single Girl” his expression would be one of arousal and anticipatory satisfaction, as frank descriptions of the sexual escapades of a moderate-minded single woman would indicate all kinds of randy, rompy activity in his immediate future.

And why in heaven would the author of said book express shock or amazement? Did Quine or the producers believe that movie stars and the characters they play should have at least a glancing relationship with the same reality? Jesus God…Wood had a brief affair with Rebel Without A Cause director Nicholas Ray when she was 16 or 17, and eight or nine years later…oh, forget it.

Early to mid ’60s sex farces were deranged, deluded, borderline Satanic.

Good heavens…Catch 22 author Joseph Heller shared screenplay credit on Sex and the Single Girl. Held his nose, cashed the paycheck.

Please read this N.Y. Times review by A.H. Weiler, published on 12.26.64:

“Sex and the Single Girl brought out the single gals in droves and clusters yesterday to the Rivoli and the Trans-Lux 52d Street. One mildewed bachelor, fearing disaster, bravely latched on to a balcony perch and finally exited with a slight stagger.

“It’s not the worst picture ever made, girls and boys. No kidding! Not even with Natalie Wood being archly pursued by Tony Curtis for over two hours and, most fortunately, with Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer bringing up the rear.

“That simpering title — all that’s left of Helen Gurley Brown‘s hope-chest best-seller — still tells the story and flavor of this Warners release. Now there’s a plot, involving Miss Wood as Helen Gurley Brown, a maidenly, 23-year-old research psychologist on advanced marital and pre-marital studies. Yeah, man! And Mr. Curtis is a scandal-magazine writer who blasts Dr. Wood’s (or Brown’s) best-selling book, then stalks her personally, blandly borrowing the problems of his neighbors for soulful couch musings and amorous bait.

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Oh, Those Ghastly Sex Comedies

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A November 2019 HE plus piece, liberated from the paywall: Almost all mainstream Hollywood sex comedies of the early to mid ’60s are pretty close to unwatchable now. (Can anyone think of a single tolerable film in this vein?) A year or two ago I was close to condemning Lover Come Back as the most painfully unfunny of them all, but they’re all horrendous to sit through.

Any way you slice it, ’60 to ’65 was a truly grotesque era when it came to farcical middle-class comedies.

Frontline commercial filmmakers of the early to mid ’60s had been aroused and influenced by French nouvelle vague and the British kitchen-sink genre, both of which ignited in the late ’50s. This resulted in frank sexual situations in several early ’60s dramas — Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (which may have been the first Hollywood dramedy of a sexual nature), Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho, Lewis Milestone‘s Ocean’s 11, Richard Quine‘s Strangers When We Meet, William Wyler‘s The Children’s Hour, Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, Alexander Singer‘s A Cold Wind in August, Vincent Minnelli‘s Two Weeks in Anther Town, Joshua Logan‘s Fanny.

But at the same time a steady outpouring of constipated sex comedies — largely inspired by the triple-whammy of Ross Hunter‘s Pillow Talk, Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and the Oscar-awarded The Apartment along with increasingly randy Playboy stirrings in the culture at large — began to manifest.

All that sexual interest, energy and intrigue, and almost all of it shackled and smothered. So many U.S. comedies about characters wanting to get randy, and all of them constrained because of the industry’s still-prevailing production code, which didn’t begin to erode until ’66 or thereabouts.

The taboo-dialogue groundbreaker was Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff, which opened on 6.21.66. Believe it or not, it was regarded as a big deal when Elizabeth Taylor‘s Martha said “goddam you!” (a substitute for the original “screw you!” in the stage version) to Richard Burton‘s George. Mainstream sexual frankness followed in short order (particularly in ’67’s The Graduate, The President’s Analyst, Belle du Jour, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Hurry Sundown and Bonnie and Clyde), and the industry was off to the races.

An HE commenter recently wrote that most early to mid ’60s sex farces are “not just bad by present standards but borderline inexplicable. They couldn’t talk about much and they couldn’t do anything, and the elaborate artificiality produces an effect not unlike a Kabuki play.”

Another said that “any film in which you hear smarmy saxophone over a close-up of a zaftig woman’s ass as she sashays out of a room is a piece of shit. And almost every sex farce from 1960-’66 had that exact shot.”

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A Thousand Words

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“William Barr’s Perversion of Justice,” a lead editorial by the N.Y. Times editorial board, presents a clear case that Trump’s attorney general is little more than a thug and a boot licker — that he’s “turning the Justice Department into a political weapon for the president” and hasn’t the slightest regard for the rule of law. But for me, the keeper is the illustration by Nicholas Konrad, which elaborates upon a photograph by Times staff photographer T.J. Kirkpatrick.


Illustration by Nicholas Konrad.

Somewhere In VOD Vapor

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From Peter Debruge’s 2.29 review: “Turns out there are a lot of things that have gone unsaid in movies until now, and Saint Frances (available on VOD) goes there in a way that’s not only enlightening, but entertaining as well. This exceptionally frank, refreshingly nonjudgmental indie was written by and stars Kelly O’Sullivan, a ‘girl next door’ type whose no-nonsense approach to issues facing both her gender and her generation leaves ample room for laughter — a la Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck.

“But unlike that Judd Apatow-produced studio entry, Saint Frances shares none of the pressure to partner up its potentially ‘unlikable’ female protagonist with a man who can handle her baggage. I put ‘unlikable’ in quotes because I adore this character: Bridget makes a lot of bad choices (who doesn’t?) and seems totally unprepared for most of what life throws at her (she’s the last candidate most folks would hire as a nanny), but she feels as human as they come. So a better comparison might be the work of Girls creator Lena Dunham, as O’Sullivan embraces her own fallibility, renders it into fiction, then presents it as comedy.”

Has anyone seen it? I haven’t.

Staying Warm On The Stove

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Without mentioning the title, I saw a serious goodie yesterday — a June release that I can’t discuss for a while yet. The only other 2020 film (a one-off intended for theatrical, I mean) that I’ve admired as much is Roman Polanski’s masterful J’Accuse (aka An Officer and a Spy). I’ll just leave it that.

Algonquin Wolves

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From “Lean’s Folly?“, posted on 1.10.18: “Ask ten film historians about David Lean‘s Ryan’s Daughter, and they’ll all say it nearly killed Lean’s career. Slow and stately, over-indulged, visually pompous and old-schoolish to a fault. And that awful, Oscar-awarded village-idiot performance by John Mills. Magnificent Freddie Young cinematography, okay, but otherwise a sudden fall from grace. Not even close to the realm of Lawrence of Arabia or Brief Encounter or Bridge on the River Kwai or even the respectably second-tier Dr. Zhivago or A Passage to India.

“But you know what? Last night I began watching an HD Amazon stream of Ryan’s Daughter on my Sony 65″ 4K TV. I was sitting there like a 12 year-old and studying the Super Panavision 70 detail and just marvelling at how good it looks. The HD transfer was apparently taken from a 35mm source but it’s staggering all the same. It looks much better than what I recall from some half-forgotten viewing at some Massachusetts or Connecticut bijou (i.e., not a 70mm house).”

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Lumet’s Lasting “Devil”

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Posted from the Toronto Film Festival on 9.12.07: “Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (ThinkFilm, 10.26) is, for me, a major Toronto Film Festival revelation…a knockout I’ll never forget.

“It’s a New York family crime drama like nothing Lumet (83 friggin’ years old and cooking with high-test like he was in the ’70s and ’80s) has ever attempted, much less achieved. And with a killer cast giving exceptional perfs — Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei. It’s like something out of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy…it’s the House of Borgia. And a great suspense film to boot.


Shout Factory Bluray pops on 5.26; also available on Amazon Prime.

“I don’t have time to get into this now (have to hit the I’m Not There party and then another film) but I’ll elaborate tomorrow. But I immediately knew this would be exceptional. How did I come to this conclusion? I figured any film that starts off with a naked Hoffman doing it doggy-style with a naked Tomei — a ‘whoa!’ shot if I’ve ever seen one — has to be dealing from a fairly exceptional deck.

“Lumet had lost the beat from time to time. The ’90s were not a glorious period for him. Critical Care (’97), Night Falls on Manhattan (’97), Gloria (’99), Guilty as Sin (’93) and A Stranger Among Us (’92) were all problem films. Q & A (’90) was the last truly decent Lumet film until Find Me Guilty came along in ’06. And now Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a better film than Find Me Guilty (which is saying a lot) and Lumet’s best since Prince of the City.”

Here are HE’s top 25 films released in 2007 — Zodiac, American Gangster, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, I’m Not There, Once, Superbad, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, Sicko, Eastern Promises, The Bourne Ultimatum, Control, The Orphanage, 28 Weeks Later, In The Valley of Elah, Ratatouille, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Darjeeling Limited, Knocked Up and Sweeney Todd.

What a year! Just as strong as ’99, and perhaps a touch better. And every one of them played in theatres. Remember theatres?

Little Did They Know

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On 2.24.08, No Country For Old Men won four Oscars — Best Picture, Best Directors (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem) and Best Adapted Screenplay. A Parasite-level sweep. But three and a half months earlier, this Miramax/Paramount Vantage release seemed like an iffy prospect to Oscar prognosticators Tom O’Neil and Pete Hammond.

Here’s how I reacted to their mid-November podcast about same, posted on or about 11.12.07.

“Although he’s now allowing that No Country for Old Men will probably eke its way into one of the five Best Picture slots, The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting, based on five or so conversations, that the widely-admired Coen brothers film is eliciting respect but not a lot of passion among Academy fudgeballs.

“O’Neil himself isn’t a great No Country admirer (he admits this), but if you know Tom you know he isn’t really speaking about quality judgment as much as the proverbial ‘longing for comfort’ factor. We all understand, I think, why O’Neil and his Academy chums are cool to this landmark film, and it starts, oddly enough, with what N.Y. Press critic Armond White called it — “a crime movie for a world at war.”

“In saying this White is rehashing an old truism, which is that all great films reflect the world in which they were made as much as the literary source material that they’re based upon. A-level artists are always responding to the electric here-and-now, and the Coen brothers were certainly in this groove when they shot and cut this film in ’06 and early ’07.

“No County for Old Men is a period film set in 1980, but it’s saying four dark things about the world of 2007. One, you can’t see what’s coming. Two, you can’t stop what’s coming. Three, the decent people are starting to be outnumbered by the indecent ones. And four, a kind of spiritual apocalypse is gathering like storm clouds and surrounding our culture.

“So there is no comfort for old Academy members in this film, even though it embodies lasting art and immaculate craft. Especially with that ‘unsatisfying ending’ that I’m sure is sticking in their craw — that kitchen-table scene with Tommy Lee Jones lamenting the loss of decency and dependability (as embodied by his late father) in his own life, and again admitting to himself and to us that he’s feeling overwhelmed and outflanked by the bad guys.

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Another ’50s-Era Rock ‘n’ Roll God…Adieu

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The most ahead-of-his-time rock ‘n’ roller in world history has passed on — a gay (i.e., “bisexual”) guy who wore makeup, flashy duds and a foot-high pompadour, and who recorded a hit 1955 song that was covertly about anal sex…c’mon! Every rocker who followed in Little Richard’s wake (i.e., everyone) has acknowledged his seminal lordship and influence. In a break-out time of bland repression and all through the decades that followed, Richard Wayne Penniman stood alone, flew his own flag, made the usual mistakes, kept pushing, kept going. Little Richard, James Brown, Chuck Berry…their legends endure.

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Sad Saddlebag

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I suddenly felt sorry this morning for my distressed leather shoulder bag, which I used to lug around everywhere. It’s big enough to carry two 15″ computers plus cords and batteries and whatnot, and I was thinking in a kind of dopey, children’s book sort of way that the bag must feel so unloved these days. Because all it does is sit there on top of a small faux-leather chest and collect dust.

I really love this rugged-looking saddlebag, and wish I could talk to it and say that it looks and feels (and smells!) so cool. If John Wayne‘s Tom Dunson needed a computer bag at the start of the cattle drive in Red River, he would have chosen this without hesitation.

Yes, it’s moronic to feel badly about a leather bag being left alone and ignored, but as strange as it sounds I feel the same way about this bag that my little brother used to feel about “fig fat”, a stuffed Panda bear that he used to carry around.

Forgive me but I’ll be taking the rest of the afternoon off in order to (a) watch a very big movie (a June release) and also (b) re-paint a couple of doors. What difference does it make?

How did it get to be Friday already? Last weekend ended only a day or two ago.