Sex & Death & Rock 'n' Roll or, The Kids Weren't Alright
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/133354-big-boys-now-or-the-kids-werent-alright/
By Michael Barrett
10 December 2010
Three turn-of-the-'70s movies, freshly available through Warner
Archives' made-on-demand service, give us distorted reflections of a
moment when peace, love and the "youth movement" became linked with
murder in the popular imagination. Before discussing the movies, we
must mention the realities that lurk behind them.
Item: The "Manson family" murders occurred in July and August 1969,
setting off a media storm that wouldn't begin to abate until Charles
Manson and others were convicted in January 1971. Bear in mind that
this is a California crime.
Item: In December 1969, Meredith Hunter was killed by Hell's Angels
acting as security at a Rolling Stones concert in Altamountanother
California crime involving wild young people with their drugs and
rock 'n' roll.
Item: Predating these, Life magazine ran an article by Don Moser in
March 1966, "The Pied Piper of Tucson". This seminal piece, reprinted
in the Library of America's True Crime: An American Anthology, tells
the story of an Arizona man named Charles Schmid who murdered three
young women and was shielded for a time by local teens. While
thousands of murderers do their work without becoming cultural
touchstones, Moser mythologized Schmid through associations with a
fairy-tale character who was the subject of a contemporary hit song
by Crispian St. Peters ("Follow Me, I'm the Pied Piper"). He knew a
zeitgeist item when he wrote one. By the end of the year, the
incident had inspired a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, "Where
Are You Going, Where Have You Been", dedicated to Bob Dylan because
she also took inspiration from his 1965 song "It's All Over Now, Baby
Blue". That story was later radically modified into the film Smooth
Talk (1985).
Moser's article and others like it were aimed not merely at
sensational revelations of the secret lives of teenagers, but at
providing a deeper thrill: the soul-searching and guilt-tripping of
middle America. Their kids weren't all right. There was something
wrong with them. That's why they were so angry and unmanageable with
their civil rights and Vietnam protests and LSD and free love and
long hair and disrespect for authority. It had to go beyond communist
agitation. By 1974, The Exorcist would explain that mouthy kids were
possessed by Satan.
It's into such a cultural brew that Hollywood began offering up
snapshots of alienated youth. These are often highly conflicted and
critical portraits, as befits movies made by and for uptight squares
about their kids while at the same time trying to appeal to those
kids. Many movies are more or less exploitive portraits of drugs and
sex that combine wistfulness and punishment. As usual, Roger Corman
had his finger on the pulse with films like The Trip and The Wild
Angels. Easy Rider is a major example of the double-barreled appeal
of celebration and cynicism. Violent youth from other eras were
served up in such items as In Cold Blood and Bonnie and Clyde. At the
same time, many adult-oriented movies began shining a hard, cold
spotlight on the American dream and the lives of the parental
generation, with greater or lesser success. Examples include An
American Dream, Rachel Rachel, Rabbit, Run, Play It As It Lays, and
The Swimmer. The Graduate linked the two generations.
Far away from these items, at the outer edge of ambition and plop in
the middle of the impulse for escapism, we find the generic thrillers
Once You Kiss a Stranger and Pretty Maids All in a Row.
Once You Kiss a Stranger is "suggested by a novel by Patricia
Highsmith", meaning it's a sort of remake of Alfred Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train, but it hasn't much in common with Highsmith or
Hitchcock in style or theme, and it doesn't even have much in common
with the trend in psycho-movies triggered by Psycho. Although it
partakes of the audience's familiarity with these things, its big
idea is to plug contemporary fears of crazy youngsters into the
template. Director Robert Sparr, a TV veteran, died in a plane crash
in August 1969 just after the Manson events exploded, so that
wouldn't have been a direct influence. However, the film was released
in April 1970, in the middle of the youth-cult uproar, and must have
coasted on the dubious resonance.
Carol Lynley plays the spoiled rich lass who lives in a groovy house
with her own slice of beach, which she defends with a speargun
against trespassing tykes. We quickly realize she's a bad, bad girl.
Famous professional golfer Jerry (Paul Burke) describes her as a
"sandtrap", and she's one this clueless, adulterous lout of a hero
can't get out of. She seduces him, polishes off his main rival by
swinging a mean putter, and tries to blackmail him into bumping off her shrink.
The movie is overlong, slow, and clumsy. At least the sets are
colorfully appointed and conspicuously consumable. In terms of plot
or character, Lynley's alienated performance as a cold pixie with
nothing but contempt for everyone, including the man she so easily
snares, is the only thing in the movie worth watching. She's vaguely
Jean Seberg-ish (especially the coiffure) and less campy than
Ann-Margret in Kitten with a Whip (which isn't as good as its title, either).
The cover of Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971) reproduces the poster
with a tagline that tells you something about its time as well as
what the movie promises: "Roger Vadim, the director who uncovered
Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda, now brings you the
American high school girl…and Rock Hudson." Over the internet today,
such a solicitation could get you arrested.
Vadim brings a Frenchman's eye to a California high school and its
youth, making this a cousin to Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and Demy's
Model Shop, only with sexual obsession replacing the ennui. It's
supposedly a murder mystery about a serial killer, but it's mainly a
sex comedy. The main thrust, as it were, concerns a virgin male
student named, really, Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson). He's
surrounded by burgeoning, mini-skirted lolitas who cause perpetual
erectile problems (not the kind that need a pill), and he gains
experience and confidence thanks to a teacher played by Angie
Dickinson as a tight-sweatered wet dream. This sounds similar to any
number of '80s sex comediesMy Tutor, Class, Losin' It. Vadim's film
was all over pay-cable TV in the early-'80s, so perhaps it was a
direct influence.
The boy's mentor is the vice principal (Rock Hudson), whose principle
vice is the female students. Much of the film shows him in various
stages of frolic. He's a kind of "right on" guru, a decorated vet,
football hero and psychologist who believes education should teach
kids to embrace life instead of being socialized and regimented. He
utters some radical philosophies and encourages the students to
discuss oppression. However, the movie has more to say about him, and
the ending leaves us wondering about the extent to which his
mentorship of Harper will prove a good thing. Lest we think the movie
is uncritically celebrating inappropriate relations in reckless
sexual-revolution bacchanalia, which is how most of it sure looks,
there's that murder plot as the girls start showing up dead,
effectively punished for their knowledge.
The plot (scripted and produced by Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek) is
barely focused upon amid comic bits of business with co-stars Telly
Savalas, Roddy McDowell and Keenan Wynn, and especially amid all the
jail-bait eye candy and the scenes of almost casual documentation of
student behavior. They sing a mocking song about Vietnam. They talk
frankly about sex and "our generation". They flash their boobs. This
is a movie more about atmosphere and ornamentation than the silly
sex-and-murder business, and once again, it sells both titillation
and caution about America's wayward youth and their capacity to
absorb bad influences.
Curious fact: an actor named Orville Sherman appears in both movies.
He's the stuffy butler of Lynley's aunt in Once You Kiss a Stranger
and the pastor who presides at funerals in Pretty Maids All in a Row.
According to IMDB, he was an actual pastor of the Church of Religious
Science. One of those California things, right?
Messed-up Innocence
Much more seriously, Barry Shear's The Todd Killings is a true-crime
film in early '70s beady-eyed, neo-realist mode, with its
associational jumpcuts and downbeat air of alienation and
desperation. Think Five Easy Pieces or The King of Marvin Gardens
without being that good, although maybe it could have been if it
starred Jack Nicholson. This is based directly on the Schmid case
mentioned above. Some reviewers now compare it with River's Edge
(1985), based on a different incident that occurred in 1981
California. There are points of comparison, although it should also
be compared with Smooth Talk, since that was indirectly inspired by
Schmid while going in a very different direction.
Schmid is now called Skipper Todd (Robert F. Lyons). The name Skipper
signals his lingering childishness as a 23-year-old who hangs out
with high school kids, and also that he's skipping any number of
things, like the oft-mentioned "responsibility". In fact, he's
diagnosed and anatomised glibly and often by all others in the cast.
There's his mom (Barbara Bel Geddes), who runs a dumping ground of an
old folks' home that her son compares to murder and which he swears
he won't live off of as he collects his allowance (the irony isn't
allowed to escape us).
There's his high school English teacher and "only intellectual in
town" (James Broderick), who lectures on Moby Dick to local
housewives because "they know they're under a death sentence". He
praises young people who protest society's problems and sharply
defines them against Skipper, whom he declares more bourgeois than
any of the ladies he mocks. There's his main girlfriend Roberta
(Belinda Montgomery), who sounds much too wise for 16 when she
dresses him down ("Are you afraid you're just like everybody else?"),
then consistently behaves like an idiot who must be raped into love.
The observational scenes of restlessness and pointlessness are often
well handled, like the bits in the old-age home. Skipper had been a
promising student but now he crashes in his room surrounded by books
and a Guernica print, supposedly composing songs while partying with
the kids. "Nobody's ever watching," he declares existentially at the
beginning, just after the first body is buried. We don't know what
happened, but our knowledge that a murder has occurred colors our
perceptions for the next hour of this sociological tract and lends
meaning to Skipper's philosophical remarks.
"You know, fornication isn't much but it's about all that Darlington
has to offer," he explains to Roberta, and he could just as be well
be quoting from The Last Picture Show or any contemporary movie about
kids on the cusp of growing up hopeless. Actually it's not quite true
about Darlington, though. They have a one-screen theatre, and it's
playing A Boy Named Charlie Brown, with The Boys in the Band promised
for next week. That's an evolution worth pondering.
Richard Thomas plays Billy Roy, who falls under Skipper's exploitive
mentorship (he calls him Billy Boy), perhaps not too far removed from
the mentor relationship in Pretty Maids. Billy Roy is just out of
reform school and hoping to score with a girl on whom he has a crush,
but who only has eyes for Skipper. Gloria Grahame and Edward Asner
have cameos, the latter as a local mobster. There's talent all over
this thing, including the spare music by Leonard Rosenman. It's very
much a sour, brooding product of its time that doesn't make the top
cut but falls somewhere in the middle of this period of cinematic
soul-searching.
Also new to Warner Archives is Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big
Boy Now (1966). How refreshing to run across a youth movie from the
dawn of this cinematic era (also the dawn of the MPAA) that's
actually made by a guy in his 20s and that has something sweet and
hopeful to say about youth. After the other pills, it feels like a
bracing antidote.
Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner) works in the New York Public
Library like his father, I.H. Chanticleer (Rip Torn), curator of
incunabula. Bernard has a vision of goddess-like Barbara Darling
(Elizabeth Hartman), a remote, impossible, wish-fulfillment figure of
fantasy who, absurdly, invites him to move in with her. Bernard, like
the hero of many an American no-sex comedy, can't actually go through
with the act about which everyone spends all their time talking and
thinking, and it's because he's so nice and klutzy and inhibited and
neurotic and can't see the nice girl (Karen Black) right in front of
him. This is a good-natured, casual and predictable story that serves
as a pretext for travelogues of New York (including pre-Disney 42nd
Street, where Bernard tries to enjoy pornography), songs by The
Lovin' Spoonful, the sheer energy of camera and editing, and quirky
comedy from troupers like Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, Michael Dunn,
Tony Bill and Dolph Sweet.
Bernard's sweetness is illustrated when he sees a graffiti that says
"Niggers go home". Since his brain is always playing word games and
making associations, he instantly translates this through "Home is
where the heart is" and "My heart is in the highlands" to an
imaginary scene of black children dancing among lovely green hills to
bagpipe music played by a black man in kilts. How's that for a pied
piper? Bernard has a magical power to turn ugliness into joy through
imagination, after which he erases the graffiti. He has neither
ignored it nor allowed it to get him down.
So, like the later Pretty Maids All in a Row and The Todd Killings,
there's a central male virgin who just wants to get laid. Like all
these other movies, it acknowledges that young people have sex, take
drugs, and act rebelliously, and unlike them, it says "God bless us
every one". In the world of this movie, the idea that kids are
getting buried in the Arizona desert or invading people's houses "in
cold blood" or getting swept up in California cults is part of a
world very far away from the exciting and bewildering jungles of
Manhattan and Long Island. It makes the movie seem innocent, even
with its messed-up women and hapless men. I won't ask which message
we'd rather hear about American youth, but I think it's worth asking
which vision of the Pied Piper is really the more naive?
.
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