1980 Week: Just Tell Me What You Want

          With some failed films, it’s easy to identify the main problem—bad timing, a miscast actor, a weak script—but with others, diagnosing what went wrong requires a more holistic approach. Nearly everyone involved in the flop romantic comedy Just Tell Me What You Want is highly proficient, from director Sidney Lumet to leading man Alan King, and the film is impeccable from a technical perspective. Plus, it’s not as if Jay Presson Allen’s script, adapted from her own novel, is a complete disaster; although the jokes don’t land and the tone is all over the place, the character work is strong. And while it’s always easy to blame the failure of an Ali MacGraw movie on MacGraw, one of the least skilled actors ever to achieve above-the-title stardom, it wasn’t impossible for gifted directors to pull serviceable work out of her, as Lumet occasionally does here.

          So the problem with Just Tell Me What You Want is simply everything about the movie. It’s a comedy that isn’t funny, a romance about self-absorbed people whose love lives don’t engender empathy, and a narrative mishmash blending boardroom intrigue, showbiz satire, and other elements into an overarching storyline far too meager to support the extra weight of thematic heaviosity. However because Just Tell Me What You Want is made so well, it’s a bad film that looks and feels very much like a good film.

          The main plot involves the on-again/off-again romance between super-rich businessman Max Hershel (King) and his mistress, TV producer “Bones” Burton (MacGraw). How much of a prick is Max? He put his alcoholic wife into an institution, he yells at his employees, he makes degrading sexual remarks to every young woman he encounters, and he casually drops the c-word when denigrating ladies who anger him. He’s also a ruthless businessman, planning to buy a movie studio just so he can liquidate assets and pave over the studio’s physical plant. “Bones” isn’t any more appealing. A cynical careerist who uses her relationship with Max for financial gain, she casually embarks on an affair with a young writer (Peter Weller), perhaps because she’s aware that Max regularly dallies with other women. And when circumstances inevitably drive “Bones” and Max apart, he exacts cruel revenge by seizing all her financial assets, suggesting she was essentially a whore living off his largesse, despite her Emmy-winning stature in the TV industry.

          Viewed in the broadest strokes, Just Tell Me What You Want is thoroughly distasteful—but closer inspection reveals attributes. King gives a terrifically committed performance, and MacGraw is livelier than usual, though still quite stilted. Supporting players Weller, Myrna Loy (in her last screen appearance), and Kennan Wynn are wonderful. And every so often, a truthful insight emerges through the dense fog of Allen’s pretentious dialogue. Whether you’re willing to tolerate the movie’s shortcomings might depend on your ability to endure Max spewing this kind of vitriol: “I wouldn’t call that bitch a taxi to take her to hell!” Romantic comedy? Not so much. Acidic character study? Closer to the mark.

Just Tell Me What You Want: FUNKY

The Borrowers (1973)

          The best children’s fables operate on the same wavelength as a kids’ imaginations, with such grown-up considerations as consequence and logic taking a backseat to magic, possibility, and wonder—plus, of course, love, which children need in such great abundance that they often invent imaginary providers. Consider the preceding to be context for remarks about The Borrowers, a made-for-TV movie that represents the first filmed adaptation of a beloved novel by Mary Norton, who also wrote the novel that became Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Starring Eddie Albert of Green Acres fame as the patriarch of a magical family, The Borrowers is far from perfect. Two key performances by juvenile actors are vapid, the special effects are old-fashioned and rickety, and the movie includes unnecessary montages set to fruity ballads. Nonetheless, the best parts of The Borrowers are so charming—and the underlying message about imagination and understanding is so worthwhile—that it’s easy to forgive the picture its faults.

          Set in Victorian England, The Borrowers takes place almost entirely in a stately mansion. The lady of the house is Sophy (Dame Judith Anderson), a bedridden aristocrat who spends her days self-medicating with wine. Attending to Sophy’s needs are a crotchety groundskeeper (Barnard Hughes) and a stern housekeeper (Beatrice Straight). Living beneath their feet is the miniscule Clock family: Pod (Albert); his wife, Homily (Tammy Grimes); and their daughter, Arrietty (Karen Pearson). The last in a long line of teeny-tiny “borrowers,” they get by on household items that Pod purloins during expeditions into the house. The only full-sized human aware of the Clock family’s existence is Sophy, but she’s convinced the little people are delusions brought on by her drunkenness. Accordingly, everything’s copacetic until Sophy becomes the temporary guardian of a preteen boy (Dennis Larson). Once the Boy (that’s his character name) spots Pod stealing a miniature cup and saucer from a dollhouse, the Boy sets in motion events that could spell doom for the “borrowers.” However, once the Boy befriends Arrietty, he becomes the Clock family’s champion instead of the family’s tormentor.

          Compensating for the flatness of the performances by Larson and Pearson, Albert is endearing, Anderson is amusing, and Grimes is warm, while Hughes and Straight provide gentle villainy. Further, Jay Presson Allen’s teleplay follows a delightful path as the Clock family wriggles free of trouble, and the values that Pod represents—as compared to the fearfulness and small-mindedness of the story’s normal-sized grown-ups—comprise a lovely message for young viewers. Therefore, it’s no surprise The Borrowers won an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children’s Programming. Fitting the proportions of its protagonist, The Borrowers is a small gem.

The Borrowers: GROOVY

Cabaret (1972)

          Cabaret is the quintessential musical for people who don’t like musicals, myself included. Not only does it tell a hard-hitting, provocative story instead of just delivering cheerful fluff, it’s a real movie that happens to have music instead of a contrived framework for musical numbers. Tunes arise naturally during moments in which characters believably break into song, such as performances in the titular nightclub, so the numbers become tools that wizardly director Bob Fosse employs, alongside brazen editing and meticulous camerawork, to guide viewers into the psyches of the characters.

          Adapted from a pair of musicals that were in turn based on autobiographical stories by the English writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Germany during the Third Reich’s rise to power, Jay Presson Allen’s Oscar-nominated script weaves the myriad threads of source material into a seamless whole, telling the story of how sexually confused Englishman Brian Roberts (Michael York) learns life lessons with, and from, crass but vulnerable American songstress Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) during their eventful idyll in pre-World War II Berlin. Sally sings at the debauched Kit Kat Klub, and Brian is a new neighbor at her boarding house. After her overpowering personality draws Brian into Sally’s life, the two become enmeshed with three Germans: poor striver Fritz (Fritz Wepper), rich Nazi apologist Maximilian (Helmut Griem), and sheltered Jewish heiress Natalia (Marisa Berenson). The audience’s sense of what the future holds for these people lends a sense of pervasive dread to the narrative.

          Tying the film together are surrealistic scenes featuring the Kit Kat Klub’s unnamed Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey), who functions as a perverse Greek Chorus complete with grotesque makeup and an immaculate tux.
          Fosse’s storytelling is astonishing from the first scene to the last because he jumps from incisive subtlety to shocking directness at regular intervals, often in the same scene, and his legendary choreography infuses the film with propulsive physicality. Whether he’s staging a comical number such as “Two Ladies” or a tender one (especially the moving “Maybe This Time”), Fosse adeptly weaves the themes of the musical interludes into the flow of the story, so Cabaret never feels like it’s stopping for big numbers. Yet while the dancing is sensuous and spectacular, Fosse’s handling of quiet dramatic scenes is just as confident. Minelli and York have never been better than they are here, with Minelli blending soft colors into her brash persona, and York expertly depicting his character’s complicated mix of moral outrage and sexual angst. Grey is equally great, turning “Emcee” into one of the most enigmatically creepy characterizations of the early ’70s.

Cabaret: OUTTA SIGHT

Funny Lady (1975)

While Barbra Streisand’s Oscar-winning film debut Funny Girl (1968) originated as a Broadway show, this lavishly produced sequel was created for the screen. Accordingly, the visual razzle-dazzle is amped up considerably from the first picture, but the spectacle overwhelms the paper-thin story. The narrative begins with Broadway comedy/singing star Fanny Brice (Streisand) reeling from the end of her marriage to callous gambler Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif, who briefly reprises his role from the first film). It’s the height of the Great Depression, so Fanny’s financial troubles make her susceptible to an overture from overbearing producer/songwriter Billy Rose (James Caan), who wants Fanny to headline his new show. The first half of the picture depicts the development and out-of-town tryouts for the show, titled Crazy Quilt, and director Herbert Ross (who staged the musical numbers for the original movie) borrows heavily from Bob Fosse’s bag of tricks to present opulent numbers with eye-popping costumes and sets. The highlight, at least from a visual perspective, is Ben Vereen’s amazing dance during “Clap Hands! Here Comes Charley”—but that scene does nothing to advance the narrative, which gives a sense of the picture’s unfocused nature. Streisand and Caan make an effective duo, each coming on so strong that they raise each other’s games, and screenwriters Jay Presson Allen and Arnold Schulman give the pair quite a few passages of edgy banter. Yet the preoccupation with surface beauty kills credibility in every scene, because, for instance, the filmmakers devote inordinate amounts of energy to making Streisand look as sexy as possible, even though she’s playing a middle-aged comedienne who was never considered a great beauty. At its worst, the movie goes totally off track with anachronistic glamour-girl numbers like “Great Day,” which looks like a clip from one of Cher’s ’70s TV specials. Streisand also drops the naïve charm of her characterization from the first film, playing Fanny as the sort of emotionally underdeveloped showbiz diva we’ve seen a million times, so it’s impossible to care when she finds herself torn between Billy and Nicky. Funny Lady is gorgeous to behold, and Streisand’s voice is as remarkable as ever, but it never connects as a love story or as a continuation of the beloved original.

Funny Lady: FUNKY