Nasty Habits (1977)

          Time has diminished much of the charm that the UK/US coproduction Nasty Habits might have possessed during its original release, because the satirical analogy the film draws between its storyline and the events of the Watergate scandal now feels contrived and tenuous. After all, the picture depicts the dirty tricks that an ambitious nun uses to win election to the office of abbess in a Philadelphia convent, and her nefarious techniques include an elaborate bugging system. In the late ’70s, when the details of Nixon’s White House bugging system were still fresh, the humor of Nasty Habits could have seemed pointed and sly. Seen today, the film thrives on its own merits, rather than as a commentary on current events, and those merits are slight.

          The picture’s main character is shrewd Sister Alexandra (Glenda Jackson), who leads a contingent of older, conservative nuns. Her rival for the abbess position is Sister Felicity (Susan Penhaligon), a pretty young blonde having a sexual affair with a Jesuit priest. Alexandra tasks her underlings with gaining incriminating evidence, so they obtain tape recordings of Felicity defying church doctrine and fomenting sedition. Not only does Alexandra win the election, but she also ejects Felicity from the convent. Upon resuming civilian life, however, Felicity launches public attacks against Alexandra, eventually becoming a folk hero for challenging a powerful institution. This turn of events triggers the movie’s closest parallels to Nixon, because reporters demand to hear Alexandra’s secret recordings, and her defiance to release them imperils her status.

          Polished in most technical regards and populated with fine actors, Nasty Habits goes down smoothly whenever the focus is Alexandra’s machinations. Jackson purrs complicated dialogue with mesmerizing authority. Complementing her are Anne Meara and Geraldine Page, who play Alexandra’s main co-conspirators. Less effective is Sandy Dennis, who plays a bumbling nun tasked with performing goofy undercover work. As for the bits with Penhaligon as Felicity, indifference seems the appropriate response. She’s spunky but unmemorable, and her character isn’t sufficiently sympathetic to energize the story. Moreover, the whole Nixon allusion is questionable because Alexandra isn’t an unhinged paranoiac like Nixon, but rather a smooth operator—so when Alexandra caps the movie by paraphrasing one of Nixon’s most famous quotes, the intended satirical flourish doesn’t quite connect. And that insufferably chirpy musical score by John Cameron? No thanks.

Nasty Habits: FUNKY

Pete ’n’ Tillie (1972)

          A grown-up romantic story that blends elements of comedy and drama with considerable artistry, Pete ’n’ Tillie pairs two actors who are equally adept at generating humor and pathos, Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau. Guided by Julius Epstein’s deservedly Oscar-nominated script and working under the sure hand of director Martin Ritt, one of the screen’s most consistent humanists, the leading actors and several fine supporting players deliver a surprising story about compromise, depression, loss, love, and redemption. Some of the plot points are more contrived than others, and the he-man attitude of Matthau’s character can be grotesque at times, but the sum effect is quite satisfying. At its best, the movie crackles with wit as Burnett’s character, who lacks self-confidence, manages her relationship with Matthau’s character, who has more confidence than he probably should. Watching gifted actors and filmmakers concentrate their energies on dramatizing the romantic woes of credible and unique middle-aged characters is a rare treat.

          The story begins at a party, where sophisticated housewife Gertrude (Geraldine Page) introduces her friends Pete (Matthau) and Tillie (Burnett) to each other. Even though Pete is brash and sarcastic while Tillie is courteous and inhibited, they make a connection. After some on-again/off-again dating, the couple marries and has a child, but a rot sets into their union once Tillie realizes that Pete regularly has flings with young women who work at his office. An even darker complication arrives later, though that twist is best discovered while watching the film. Suffice to say that Pete and Tillie’s relationship suffers injury after injury, with the years-long ordeal eventually taking a heavy toll on Tillie’s psyche.

          Since Matthau’s charming-rascal routine was familiar to audiences by the time Pete ’n’ Tillie was released, the revelation of the picture is Burnett’s performance. Predictably, she nails the reaction shots and verbal zingers in banter scenes—while still operating within the buttoned-down parameters of her character—but less predictably, she’s quite affecting in the film’s heavily emotional scenes. Watching her wail vitriol toward the heavens after a particularly cruel turn of events is especially wrenching, and the strong association one makes between Burnett and broad comedy never once detracts from the dramatic aspects of her work here. Given the strong leading turns, the film’s excellent supporting performances—by Page and by Rene Auberjoinois, who plays Tillie’s pragmatic gay friend—elevate the picture further, thereby making it even easier to overlook instances of clumsily schematic plotting.

Pete ’n’ Tillie: GROOVY

Interiors (1978)

          After writing and directing an extraordinary run of comedy films, from 1969’s Take the Money and Run to 1977’s Annie Hall, Woody Allen needed a change, so he dove headlong into drama with Interiors, a grim chamber piece that recalls the work of Allen’s cinematic hero, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman. Like Bergman’s myriad stories about the mysteries of the human soul, Interiors presents sophisticated but troubled individuals who possess the uncanny ability to articulate even the most miniscule nuances of emotion. Yet while Bergman’s singular movies exist on some elevated metaphorical plane that justifies the contrivance of hyper-verbal characters, Allen’s endeavor represents a queasy hybrid of realism and symbolism. That said, it’s helpful to view Interiors as a transitional moment, because while making his very next movie, 1979’s Manhattan, Allen found a more comfortable idiom by merging comedy with drama. Therefore, it’s as if Allen needed to flush jokes out of his system before he could evolve into a mature artist.
          This long preamble is a kind way of saying that Interiors would seem laughably dour and pretentious had it been made by anyone but a legitimate filmmaker in the midst of an important metamorphosis. In fact, notwithstanding rapturous cinematography by Gordon Willis and strong performances by an eclectic cast, Interiors sometimes approaches self-parody.
          Set primarily at a beach house in the Hamptons, the story borrows from the Eugene O’Neill template of a family plagued by epic dysfunction. Eve (Geraldine Page), an interior designer in late middle age, has been in crisis ever since her husband, Arthur (E.G. Marshall), left her. Over the course of several months, Eve attempts suicide, Arthur remarries, and their daughters wrestle with various neuroses. Nearly every scene in the picture features a depressing visual metaphor, whether it’s an off-white wall decorated by Eve as an expression of her barren emotional life, or an ominous shadow indicative of the ennui suffocating the characters.

          While undeniably artistic, intelligent, and ruminative, Allen’s unrelenting screenplay feels contrived, especially when characters unleash reams of overwritten dialogue. For instance, put-upon daughter Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) delivers a speech that summarizes the movie’s themes far too perfectly: “All the beautifully furnished rooms, carefully designed interiors—everything’s so controlled. There wasn’t any room for any real feelings.” And the scripting gets worse. Later in the same scene, Joey says, “There’s been perverseness and willfulness of attitude to many of the things you’ve done.” Allen has often evinced a proclivity for lines that are so “written” they sound unnatural emanating from actors, but his dramaturgical instinct has rarely failed him as completely as it does throughout Interiors.

          That said, the film is hardly without virtues. Aesthetically, Interiors is a triumph, with the combination of long takes and purposeful silence (there is no score) creating just the right kind of claustrophobia. Furthermore, the acting is impassioned, with performers struggling to make Allen’s stilted worlds sound organic—and occasionally succeeding. Page and costar Maureen Stapleton (who plays Arthur’s second wife) both received Oscar nominations, while Hurt, Marshall, Richard Jordan, and Diane Keaton all do strong work. Each character in the film, however, is essentially an elevated version of a cliché: the alcoholic novelist, the happy idiot, the soulful depressive, the vapid actress, and so on. Accordingly, Interiors remains most interesting as an artistic steppingstone, because it’s far too artificial, chilly, and pretentious to fully succeed as a movie.

Interiors: FUNKY

The Rescuers (1977)

          Sticking to its core formula of warm-hearted stories about anthropomorphized animals, the Walt Disney Company offered The Rescuers as its last animated feature of the ’70s. Since the feature-length ’toons Disney released in the following decade all fell short of commercial and critical expectations—until 1989’s The Little Mermaid began a mega-successful renaissance—it’s possible to look at The Rescuers as the end of the classic era for Disney animated features. And, indeed, the film is made with the studio’s customary care, combining clear plotting, intricate comedy, smooth onscreen movement, and tearjerker story elements into something that vaguely resembles the earlier peaks of, say, Lady and the Tramp (1955) and 101 Dalmatians (1961). Alas, whereas those pictures earned iconic status through the combination of ingenious stories and vivid characterizations, The Rescuers represents style in search of substance. The narrative is inherently diffuse because the lead characters are merely bystanders to the emotional core of the tale—they’re the rescuers, after all, not the rescued—and far too many aspects of the picture feel recycled from previous Disney fare.

          Adapted from a book series by Margery Sharp, the picture concerns an organization called the Rescue Aid Society, comprised entirely of mice from around the globe; the group’s mission involves saving people who’ve been kidnapped. Whatever. When the story opens in New York City, posh lady mouse Miss Bianca (voiced by Eva Gabor) recruits the group’s shy janitor, Bernard (voiced by Bob Newhart), for help in responding to a message in a bottle sent by an abducted young girl. The mice hitch a ride on an albatross, make their way to bayou country, and tangle with evil human woman Madame Medusa (voiced by Geraldine Page), who swiped young orphan Penny (voiced by Michelle Stacy) as part of a scheme to find a massive diamond. There’s also a lot of business involving Madame Medusa’s pet alligators and a perky dragonfly.

          Nothing in The Rescuers is objectionable, in the sense that everything is presented with professionalism and a measure of artistry. However, there’s not a lot of meat on the bone. The banter between Bernard and Miss Bianca is fine, with Newhart doing his usual stammering bit and Gabor breathing her lines with aristocratic flair, but the story’s only nominally about their characters, so the Bernard/Bianca scenes don’t command much attention. The Madame Medusa bits, meanwhile, feels like lukewarm riffs on Cruella DeVil. Still, one point in The Rescuers’ favor is that the characters don’t sing. Instead, moody songs about loneliness appear on the soundtrack to accentuate scenes. Combined with lush background paintings, the music conveys a sense of atmosphere, particularly during the bayou sequences. Given such admirable components, The Rescuers isn’t bad by any measure, and in fact it was a significant hit, eventually generating a sequel, The Rescuers Down Under, in 1990. Nonetheless, one would encounter difficulty arguing that this picture represents Disney animation at its best, except perhaps on a technical level.

The Rescuers: FUNKY

The Beguiled (1971)

          Clint Eastwood went to several strange and interesting places, dramatically speaking, during his late ’60s/early ’70s transition from playing cowboys to being the fully-realized icon known as Clint Eastwood. (Dirty Harry, released in 1971, completed his ascendance.) Eastwood’s wilderness years featured everything from musicals to war movies, but there’s something particularly fascinating about The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me, both released in 1971 (quite a year for Eastwood), because these two movies pit Eastwood against the unlikely but formidable opponents of scorned women. Of the pair, The Beguiled is the more provocative, since the narrative of Play Misty for Me provides an escape valve—the villain of that piece is a psychopath. In The Beguiled, the principal antagonistic force is the savagery churning inside Eastwood’s character.

          Set in the South during the Civil War, the picture begins when a young girl, Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), wanders through a forest and finds a wounded Union soldier, John (Eastwood). She guides him back to the boarding school where she lives with a handful of other young women, some of whom are near adulthood. The school is run by tough but psychologically fragile Martha (Geraldine Page). Initially, Martha says John should be handed over to Rebel soldiers, but, as do the other females in the school, she becomes enchanted by the handsome stranger. While John is nursed back to health, he woos not only Martha but also her second-in-command, the virginal Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman). Meanwhile, coquettish Carol (Jo Ann Harris) makes her sexual desires plain to John. Thus begins a dark odyssey involving betrayal, lies, schemes, and temptation. John plays every angle to his advantage, figuring he’ll soon be well enough to exit the school on his own power, and each woman with whom he builds a relationship accepts the face he shows to her. (As viewers, we know he’s lying to all of them.)

          Director Don Siegel, the reliable B-movie helmer who emerged during this period as Eastwood’s mentor, does some of his best-ever work in The Beguiled, employing the candlelit interiors and mossy exteriors of the Southern setting to create powerful visual metaphors—the school at the center of the story is a fertile place where wild passions grow. Siegel also stages the movie like a slow-burn horror story, and the revenge Martha takes on John once she realizes his true nature is memorably brutal.

          The Beguiled runs a little long, and a director with a subtler touch could have added further dimensions, but nearly everything in the movie works, at least to some degree. Furthermore, the female performances are so good that they sell the story’s premise. Page is stern and twitchy, adding a thread of Gothic grandeur, while Harris, Hartman, and the other supporting ladies present a spectrum of complicated femininity. Eastwood stretches to the outside edges of his skill set, but the role neatly twists his macho energy into menace. While it’s tempting to brand The Beguiled as misogynistic cinema (the same criticism often lobbed at Play Misty for Me), the picture has too many dimensions to support that simplistic a reading. In the world of The Beguiled, everyone is guilty of succumbing to vile impulses.

The Beguiled: GROOVY

J.W. Coop (1971)

          Actor Cliff Robertson dove headfirst into this vanity piece about a middle-aged rodeo cowboy trying to restart his career after a stretch in prison: In addition to playing the leading role, Robertson directed, produced, and co-wrote the overly meticulous character study. It’s tempting to say ego led Robertson to use every scrap of film he shot, since the film drags terribly at 112 minutes, but it’s just as likely he was trying to create a stylistic alternative to standard Hollywood artifice. To his credit, J.W. Coop is consistently authentic and sincere. Unfortunately, it’s not consistently entertaining.

          The picture begins when J.W. (Robertson) leaves prison and returns home to check in on his senile mother (Geraldine Page). Seeing only desperation in his hometown, he hits the rodeo circuit, and along the way gets involved with a pretty young hippie, Bean (Cristina Ferrare). He also has inconsequential adventures like a run-in with a cop who wants to cite J.W. for pollution, and a barroom brawl in which he defends a black friend against racist hoodlums. The goal of these episodes seems to be defining Coop as an honorable iconoclast so we’ll perceive his eventual showbiz excesses as tragic, because once J.W. gets back into the swing of bronc riding, he ascends the ranks until his only real competition is a superstar cowboy who flies his own private plane from one rodeo to the next. The picture asks how much J.W. is willing to risk to become the top guy on the circuit.

          Utilizing documentary-style footage and featuring many real-life figures from the rodeo world in supporting roles, J.W. Coop offers a believable look at a colorful subculture, and some of the bronc-busting action is intense, particularly the spectacular ride that a stunt man takes in the finale. However, the story holding this material together isn’t strong, and neither, frankly, is Robertson’s performance.

          The rare actor who chose to underplay once becoming his own director, Robertson is so soft-spoken and still throughout J.W. Coop that he generates nearly undetectable energy, if any. (Having said that, his rural accent and mannerisms are completely believable.) Leading lady Ferrare is mostly decorative, while Fitzgerald and durable character actor R.G. Armstrong—easily the picture’s best performers—don’t get enough screen time to compensate for Robertson’s sleepiness. As a result of its many weaknesses, J.W. Coop doesn’t make much of an impression, even though it’s on many levels tough and admirable.

J.W. Coop: FUNKY