1980 Week: Stardust Memories

          Woody Allen’s myriad remarks over the years that Stardust Memories is not an autobiographical movie are at least slightly disingenuous, the understandable backpedaling of a popular artist who was perceived as slighting his fan base. After all, Allen plays Sandy Bates, a neurotic comedy-movie auteur enduring an existential crisis after audiences turn on him for experimenting with drama. Any resemblance to Allen, who followed the crowd-pleasing Annie Hall (1976) with the dour chamber piece Interiors (1977), is purely coincidental. Yeah, right. Allen’s disclaimers notwithstanding, Stardust Memories is an extraordinary exercise in public self-examination. Questioning the purpose of filmmaking and the value of humor in world seemingly zooming toward destruction, Stardust Memories skillfully integrates jokes, melodrama, romance, and what might be called spirituality. (One must tread lightly there, given Allen’s endless proclamations of atheism.)

          Even the rapturous black-and-white images of Stardust Memories have a metatextual kick, since audiences embraced the monochromatic cinematography of Allen’s previous film, Manhattan (1979), broadly seen as his return to comedic form following the failure of Interiors. Like so many other things in Stardust Memories, the repetition of a trope from a prior film defines Allen as an artist not only willing but eager to wrestle with the potentialities of tropes by applying them to varying forms of subject matter. If black-and-white images mean such-and-such in X context, what do they mean in Y context? It’s all about digging deeper and asking more problematic questions. Whereas Allen’s beloved “early, funny” movies mostly eschew cinematic style in favor of gags and narrative speed, Stardust Memories represents the apex of an evolution that began with Annie Hall. While life itself is ultimately Allen’s main subject, with Stardust Memories he fully integrates the complications of his own reputation into his repertoire, and he does so at the very same career moment when he assumes full command of cinema as a storytelling medium.

          While all this critical-studies significance is a lot of weight to drop onto Stardust Memories’ shoulders, the movie can bear the burden.
          Filled with insights and ruminations and witticisms, it’s a singularly alive piece of filmmaking. Once again, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis create striking imagery, and once again, Allen pulls terrific work from an eclectic cast. (Watch for Sharon Stone, making her movie debut, in the opening scene.) Presented in a somewhat freeform style with more than a few touches of classic European arthouse cinema, Stardust Memories explores the fictional Sandy Bates’ life from myriad perspectives. Even as he juggles romances with challenging Daisy (Jessica Harper) and comforting Isobel (Marie-Christine Berrault), Sandy contemplates ghosts from his relationship with a troubled woman named Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling). More pointedly—since Allen spun a similar romantic web in Manhattan—the Sandy character allows Allen to ask what audiences expect from him, and why audiences resist change in his persona. In the picture’s most famous scene, aliens from outer space remind Sandy that his greatest gift is being able to make people laugh, and that humor may well contribute more to the human experience than Bergman-esque ennui.

          Left unresolved, of course, is the question of whether Sandy (or Allen, for that matter) can reconcile his clashing artistic impulses. Witness the incredible highs and lows of Allen’s subsequent output, wherein he has tried to merge what he does well with what he simply wants to do well. Like Bob Fosse’s extraordinary All That Jazz (1979), Stardust Memories is part performance review and part psychoanalysis. Not everything in Stardust Memories works, since Allen periodically succumbs to the very pretentiousness that disgruntled fans perceived in Interiors, but Stardust Memories is an essential chapter of the Woody Allen story. It’s also among the nerviest statements a popular American artist has ever made, a declaration of independence from expectations and preconceptions.

Stardust Memories: GROOVY

Inserts (1974)

          The first hurdle to get over when approaching writer-director John Byrum’s strange little movie Inserts is trying to understand how the thing got made. Setting aside the presence of leading man Richard Dreyfuss, who was on the rise in the early ’70s thanks to American Graffiti (1973), everything about Inserts screams “uncommercial.” The piece unfolds like a play, with real-time interaction between a small set of characters sprawling across a single location for 117 minutes; the dense dialogue occasionally tips over into pretention; and the film is filled with sex on every level, so even though the depiction of physical encounters is not explicit, Inserts borders on porn just for the sheer amount of sexual content. (The MPAA slapped the picture with an X rating during its original release.) Put succinctly, Inserts is a North American movie that feels like a European art-house picture, and on top of everything else, it’s dark as hell. Therefore, asking how the movie came into being is futile. It was the ’70s, man.

          Byrum takes viewers on a unique journey, although chances are many viewers give up before the trip reaches its destination—the weirdness factor is undoubtedly a turn-off for some. That said, Inserts is full of intellectual and visceral rewards for those who lock into Byrum’s bizarre frequency. Inserts is a movie about movies, but it’s also about ambition, artistic hubris, emotional paralysis, manipulation, and power—all of which are viewed through the prism of carnal knowledge.

          Set in the 1930s, Inserts takes place in the mansion of Boy Wonder (Dreyfuss), a movie director whose career peaked in the silent era. Boy Wonder drove himself out of the film business with diva behavior, so now he makes his living by shooting stag reels in his own home—a nice arrangement, seeing as how Boy Wonder has become a virtual recluse. Then as now, the porn business attracts damaged souls, so Boy Wonder’s cast members for the shoot depicted in Inserts are Harlene (Veronica Cartwright), a heroin-addicted former mainstream movie actress, and “Rex, the Wonder Dog” (Stephen Davies), a dimwit stud with violent tendencies. Underwriting the whole affair is Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), a crude gangster who hits the scene accompanied by Cathy (Jessica Harper), an intense striver determined to break into movies no matter what it takes. As the story progresses, Boy Wonder plays mind games on his actors to get work out of them. Later, when tragedy strikes, Boy Wonder himself becomes the victim of mind games.

          Even though Inserts is in many ways a film of ideas, giving away too much of the plot would be a disservice to the piece, because the layers of character that get revealed with every plot twist add to the richness of Byrum’s deranged tapestry. Every character is a lost soul of some kind, so watching them grasp for solid ground makes for fascinating sport. Not everything in Inserts works, and the perverse nature of the material ensures that cynical viewers will find the piece more credible than optimistic ones. Still, this is singular work fueled by passionate acting.

          Carwright nails a poignant mixture of naïveté and world-weariness, while Harper presents a character who seems like a skin-trade riff on All About Eve’s Eve Harrington—the hungry young thing without a conscience. Hoskins is effectively boarish and frightening, while Davies personifies the confusion of a man unable to grasp the full dimensions of his own circumstances. As for Dreyfuss, he’s incandescent, the complicated and precise nuances of his performance mitigated only by the actor’s overpowering self-satisfaction. (Few stars seem to relish their own skills as obviously as Dreyfuss does, though a strong argument could be made that arrogance was the perfect choice of emotional though-line for Boy Wonder.) Overall, Inserts is a deeply odd movie, given the juxtaposition of its lofty literary style and its sleazy subject matter. Grim and insightful and macabre and stylish and surprising, it’s a high-wire act performed in a sewer.

Inserts: FREAKY

The Evictors (1979)

Low-budget filmmaker Charles B. Pierce was relentless about trying to recapture the success of his first movie, The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a backwoods monster movie that was shamelessly sold as a true story, even though it wasn’t. For instance, Pierce’s last flick of the ’70s, The Evictors, wasn’t a true story either, despite hype to the contrary. Set in Louisiana circa 1942 (with extensive flashbacks to the same area in 1928), The Evictors employs the scary premise of displaced psychos tormenting the current residents of the psychos’ former home. Unfortunately, the movie is far less interesting than the concept. To the dismay of viewers suckered by the spooky poster and trailer, The Evictors comprises an hour of boring preamble and about 30 minutes of underwhelming climax. Like Pierce’s other Southern-fried shockers, the picture has atmospheric widescreen cinematography and decent production design, but there isn’t enough narrative to sustain a feature. The picture begins with a sepia-toned flashback of cops trying to evict rednecks from an attractive rural home in 1928. Bloodshed ensues. Cut to 1942, when newlyweds Ben Watkins (Michael Parks) and Ruth Watkins (Jessica Harper) decide to buy the house from overly solicitous realtor Jake Rudd (Vic Morrow). For the next hour, Ruth grows worried based on cryptic written threats and the resulting vague suspicions. (The acting in The Evictors is exactly as lifeless as the material deserves, though cult-fave starlet Harper is a uniquely vulnerable presence in any context.) To get a sense of how ineptly Pierce tries to build tension, consider the bit where Ruth walks into her property’s barn, looks directly at a group of chickens, then yelps when one of the chickens hops off the ground. Pierce tries to jack up moments like these with spooky music, but the sum effect is still ridiculous. Occasionally, the movie livens up with a grisly flashback—as when someone gets murdered with a horseshoe attached to the end of a stick—and, of course, when “the evictors” finally show up at the end of the movie, a few minutes of chasing and running and screaming occur. This is followed by a head-scratcher of a “twist” ending.

The Evictors: LAME

Suspiria (1977)

          Arguably the most beloved of Italian shock-cinema maestro Dario Argento’s various bloody cinematic freakouts—beloved by a certain stripe of masochistic viewer, that is—Suspiria is like a tone poem written in the form of a fan letter to Fangoria. Taking place in some bizarro alternate universe comprised entirely of horror-movie clichés, Suspiria is a nasty piece of work that takes perverse pleasure in getting a rise out of viewers, yet what separates it from standard slasher fare is the surrealistic artistry of Argento’s filmmaking. From the disturbing music (more on that in a minute) to the crazy lighting, which casts blazingly hot beams of bright colors across almost every scene, Suspiria is cranked up to overdrive from start to finish.

          The story, which couldn’t possibly matter less, concerns wide-eyed American dancer Suzy Banion (Jessica Harper), who is invited to enroll in a European dance academy. The night she arrives, one of the students is stalked and murdered by a psycho, and as various creepy things happen around Suzy, our intrepid heroine slowly, dimly, excruciatingly figures out All Is Not Right.™ Yes, even the hoary cliché of the Unbelievably Stupid Young Woman™ is represented in Suspiria, although with a trippy twist: The nutjobs running the dance academy start drugging Suzy soon after her enrollment, so for all intents and purposes, she’s high throughout most of the movie.

          It seems reasonable to assume that some of the folks behind the camera were toking as well, since Suspiria feels like a funhouse-mirror version of reality. Walls are alive with shadows and mysterious movements; maggots infest an attic; the exterior and interior spaces of the school look like backdrops from some experimental theater piece; and everyone talks in stilted phrases with no discernible relation to actual human speech. (Strange-cinema mainstay Udo Keir’s performance is particularly absurd, since dubbing magically erases his thick German accent.) More importantly, for shock value anyway, all of the characters are so weird that any rational person would run for the hills upon encountering these ghouls. Yet Suzy just hangs out, even as innumerable clues and otherworldly goings-on suggest her teachers are witches, because that’s what people do in over-the-top horror pictures: They linger because They Don’t Trust Their Own Senses.™

          As straight narrative, Suspiria is a disaster—when it’s not tediously repetitive, it’s insultingly obvious—but as an exercise in sicko style, it’s impressive. The picture’s crucial element, without question, is that aforementioned music, by a rock group called Goblin (with help from Argento). Played at punishingly loud volumes, Goblin’s music features surreal, jangling death rattles mixed with a vocal motif that sounds like a distant echo of a child’s lullaby. When those sounds are juxtaposed with Argento’s Day-Glo montages of women getting mutilated, it’s impossible not to react, because the audience is getting bludgeoned as mercilessly as the characters.

          If there’s any point to this exercise in excess other than trying to make viewers ill, however, it isn’t immediately apparent. So, if you go for this sort of thing, Suspiria is some kind of milestone achievement. If you don’t, it’s merely an unpleasant audiovisual assault created by One Really Sick Dude,™ a sobriquet one suspects Argento would consider a compliment.

Suspiria: FREAKY

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

          A year before The Rocky Horror Picture Show flopped on movie screens in the first step of its journey toward becoming a cult classic, another rock-and-roll musical did the exact same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale. Written and directed by Brian De Palma, whose work on the picture bridges his early efforts at counterculture-themed satire with his future identity as a suspense maven, Phantom of the Paradise is an intentionally funny but still deeply weird morality tale about the inevitable problems that arise when art gets into bed with big business.

          William Finley, a gangly and bug-eyed college chum of De Palma’s whose film career mostly consists of strange characterizations in his friend’s movies, stars as Winslow, a sensitive composer finishing his masterpiece, a rock cantata adapted from Goerthe’s Faust. Winslow’s music catches the ear of megalomaniacal producer/executive Swan (Paul Williams), who steals Winslow’s magnum opus. Winslow seeks revenge, which triggers an insane series of events that leave Winslow disfigured and presumed dead.

          Thus, Winslow becomes a masked maniac called the Phantom, wreaking bloody havoc on Swan’s lavish new theater, the Paradise. Undaunted, Swan strikes a deal with his nemesis, because it turns out Swan’s in league with supernatural forces—and not above manipulating poor Winslow by threatening the life of the pretty young singer Winslow loves, Phoenix (Jessica Harper). To say that all of this comes to a bad end isn’t giving anything away, since violent climaxes are in the nature of these things, but the devil, pun intended, is in the details.

          De Palma fills the screen with bizarre costumes, sets, and props that blend everything from futurism to leather fetishism to pop art to transvestitism, so Phantom’s visuals are a crazy quilt of flamboyant signifiers. The Phantom’s guise, for instance, includes a strange biker helmet with some sort of bird-beak protrusion over the face and a gigantic eyehole that accentuates one of Finley’s abnormally large orbs. And then there’s the offbeat look of the movie’s real villain, Swan.

          Diminutive singer-songwriter Williams, of “Evergreen” fame, was often cast in ’70s films and TV shows as freaky characters because his tiny body and long blonde hair lent him a childlike look that he undercut by portraying creeps. In Phantom, Williams’ appearance is exploited in an especially playful fashion: His character is sexual catnip to every woman in sight. Yes, Phantom really does include (chaste) orgy scenes in which beautiful women writhe in ecstasy at the thought of bedding Paul Williams.

          The picture gets more outré when priceless B-movie actor Gerrit Graham shows up as Beef, a muscular glam-rock singer who’s a macho monster onstage and a prissy queen offstage; Graham is hysterical, the movie’s energy flags the minute he leaves the story, especially since his exit is such an outrageous high point.

          Despite being a quasi-horror picture, Phantom of the Paradise isn’t scary. It’s so over-the-top ironic that it’s impossible to take anything seriously, and in fact the picture’s incessant wink-wink strangeness makes the whole thing feel like a did-I-really-just-see-that dream. However, thanks to a breathless pace, nonstop cartoonish imagery, and the peculiar potency of Williams’ music (he composed the tunes himself, and shared an Oscar nomination for the background score with George Aliceson Tipton), Phantom of the Paradise is never boring.

 

Phantom of the Paradise: FREAKY