How Awful About Allan (1970)

          Ten years after the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), actor Anthony Perkins was still trying to avoid typecasting—even though he occasionally backslid to the realm of psychological horror. In this competent but underdeveloped made-for-TV thriller, Perkins plays a man who returns home after spending eight months in an asylum. Prior to his institutionalization, Allan (Perkins) started a fire that killed his parents and permanently scarred his sister, Katherine (Julie Harris). The trauma also left Allan partially blind, though doctors insist his condition is psychosomatic. Written by Henry Farrell, who adapted his novel of the same name, How Awful About Allan feels a bit like a play, since nearly the whole thing takes place in the large house Allan shares with his sister. Allan, who may or may not have fully recovered his mental health, keeps “seeing” a mystery figure roaming around the house, although Katherine insists she and Allan are alone. Meanwhile, Allan tries to recover normalcy by interacting with doctors and with a family friend, Olive (Joan Hackett). The central question, therefore, is whether Allan has discovered the activities of a home invader with malicious intent, or whether Allan has simply gone crazy.

          Director Curtis Harrington, who helmed a fair number of spooky projects during a long career that included everything from documentary work to episodic television, does what he can to jack up the mood and style of How Awful About Allan, but his hands are tied by the internal nature of Farrell’s story. Since the real drama takes place inside Allan’s head, very little action occurs, so the movie includes many repetitive scenes of Perkins walking around the house and calling out to people who don’t answer. Quick flashbacks to the traumatic fire and a mildly violent finale add some oomph, though for many viewers this will represent a case of too little, too late. Still, Perkins is interesting to watch in nearly any circumstance, with his intense expressions and lanky physique cutting a memorable figure—especially when he zeroes in on his Norman Bates sweet spot. It’s also worth noting that How Awful About Allan was produced by small-screen schlockmeister Aaron Spelling, whose other horror-themed projects for television were, generally speaking, less subtle than this one. So, even if How Awful About Allan is fairly limp by normal standards, it’s the equivalent of a prestige project by Spelling standards.

How Awful About Allan: FUNKY

The Hiding Place (1975)

          Based on a memoir by concentration-camp survivor Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place details what happened when a Dutch family transformed their home into a safe haven for Jews during the German occupation of Holland, only to pay a horrific price for their altruism. Infused with probing theological conversations about how a merciful God can allow the existence of cruelty and suffering, The Hiding Place is a sermon in the form of a drama. Yet the unflinching way that director James F. Collier and his collaborators depict the hardships of war entirely from the victims’ perspective—no effort is made to humanize or “understand” the oppressors—gives the piece tremendous credibility. Ultimately, The Hiding Place is a story about the challenge of maintaining genuine faith when confronted with the worst of what humans can do to each other.

          The picture begins at the onset of the occupation, when Gentile patriarch Casper ten Boom (Arthur O’Connell) decides to take a stand against the Nazis who have invaded his homeland. Casper, a kindly grandfather who runs his family’s century-old clock shop, initially defies the Germans by wearing a gold star on his sleeve in solidarity with ostracized Jews. Later, accepting entreaties from the Dutch Resistance, Casper allows his family’s large home to be fitted with secret compartments capable of holding a large number of fugitives. Throughout the first half of the picture, Casper and his relatives—notably adult daughters Betsie (Julie Harris) and Corrie (Jeannette Clift)—justify their actions by articulating their love for Jesus. This first half also includes fraught relations between the ten Booms and some of their “boarders,” who appreciate the family’s courage but disagree with their Christian ideology.

          Midway through the picture, the Nazis discover that the ten Booms have aided Jews—although the Germans fail to find the people hidden inside the ten Boom household, all of the ten Booms are carted off to concentration camps. Thereafter, the movie becomes a survival story focused on the time Betsie and Corrie spend as prisoners in a work camp. (The focus also expands to include Corrie’s closest confidant in the camp, fellow prisoner Katje, played with fierce determination by Eileen Heckart.) The second half of The Hiding Place is filled with abuse and pain and tragedy, and yet through all her travails Connie tries to espouse her father’s ideals of surmounting earthly rigors through faith.

          The strongest virtue of The Hiding Place is that it never casts Corrie’s wartime ordeal in a nostalgic glow, as if the Holocaust was merely a test of faith; instead, the picture offers a clinical look at how one family, and by extension one individual, relied on religion to sustain humanity amid an inhumane situation. The anguished performances by Clift and Harris deliver this theme passionately, just as the unvarnished filmmaking by Collier and his technicians accentuates the terrifying reality of concentration-camp existence. Given its narrow focus, The Hiding Place is too long, even though each scene more or less justifies its own existence with some flourish of narrative or performance; furthermore, the picture probably didn’t need quite as many dialogue exchanges about theology. Nonetheless, this is powerful, sincere work about a subject that can never be explored in sufficient depth—and the movie also represents a fine tribute to an individual, and a family, possessed of extraordinary moral strength.

The Hiding Place: GROOVY

The People Next Door (1970)

          Similar in content to innumerable TV movies about suburban parents wrestling with their teenage kids’ drug use, The People Next Door is elevated by world-class cinematography and a smart script that shines an ironic spotlight on “acceptable” substance abuse by grown-ups. Part of the reason the piece goes down so smoothly is that it actually was a TV movie in an earlier incarnation; writer J.P. Miller and director David Greene made The People Next Door as a small-screen drama in 1968 before delivering the big-screen version two years later.
          The story explores the lives of Arthur Mason (Eli Wallach) and his wife Gerrie (Julie Harris), an all-American couple raising high-school student Maxie (Deborah Winters) and her older brother, recent high-school graduate Artie (Stephen McHattie). Artie is a longhaired rock musician involved with the counterculture, so he drives his father crazy. Meanwhile, Maxie can do no wrong in her parents’ eyes—until the night she wigs out on acid. Once Maxie sobers up, she reveals that she’s not only using drugs but also sleeping around.
          What’s more, she hates her parents for being phonies: Arthur is an adulterer, while Gerrie ignores reality by pretending everything is copacetic. The Masons try to coax Maxie back to their idea of a normal life, but an overdose renders her catatonic, forcing the Masons to institutionalize their “sweet little girl.” Miller’s unsubtle theme about troubles visiting even the best families is leavened by a secondary focus on Arthur’s drinking and Gerrie’s smoking, so the thought-provoking idea that everybody wants some form of escape from life comes through loud and clear.
          The acting in The People Next Door is effective if not particularly revelatory. Wallach does a fine job illustrating a man who is paradoxically strong-willed and terrified of confrontation. Harris is vulnerable essaying someone who has hid so long beneath a plastic shell that she barely knows herself anymore. And Winters, reprising her performance from the TV version, plays against her girl-next-door prettiness by unleashing a volatile mix of narcissism and rebelliousness. However, Hal Holbrook nearly steals the show as the Masons’ neighbor; his final scene is chilling for its mixture of anger and anguish. (Cloris Leachman is interesting but underused as the wife of Holbrook’s character.)
          The People Next Door is strongest when it dramatizes the way drugs exacerbate familial tension, and the movie wobbles when it tries to address larger issues like student protests. Overall, however, the movie offers a rational examination of subject matter that is more often depicted hysterically. In terms of tethering the storyline to a recognizable version of reality, the movie’s greatest virtue is the cinematography by Gordon Willis (The Godfather). Not only does Willis cloak scenes in his signature deep shadows, he finds sly ways of easing actors into dramatic compositions that poignantly accentuate the emotional distance between characters.

The People Next Door: GROOVY

The Bell Jar (1979)

          A perennial favorite of adolescent women suffering fraught emotional lives, poetess Sylvia Plath’s sole novel, The Bell Jar, is a thinly veiled account of Plath’s real-life experiences as a young woman who fell from the heights of academic overachievement to the depths of electroshock therapy after emotional problems led to a series of suicide attempts. In the right hands, this book could be adapted into a bold and honest drama, providing a sensitive exploration into the mysteries of mental illness. In the wrong hands, as is the case here, The Bell Jar becomes fodder for cheap manipulation.

          Director Larry Peerce and his on- and offscreen muse, actress Marilyn Hassett, reteamed for this project after their success with The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) and The Other Side of the Mountain Part 2 (1978), which were about a real-life skier who became a paraplegic. Nothing in those trite films suggested Peerce or Hassett were predisposed toward investigating the intricacies of the human mind—and, sure enough, their take on The Bell Jar is sincere but numbingly superficial.

          Furthermore, the script, by Marjorie Kellogg, departs in significant ways from the source material, conjuring a gruesome climax that’s absent from the book; Kellogg also streamlines Plath’s narrative in a way that makes the lead character’s trip down the rabbit hole seem like a brief detour on the way to wellness. In short, the filmmakers blew a powerful opportunity to depict what it’s like to feel trapped in one’s own mind, instead focusing on the garish sensationalism of a beautiful young woman experimenting with sex before succumbing to personal demons.

          As in the book, Esther Greenwood (Hassett) is a gifted student who wins a summer internship at a ladies’ magazine, where she’s challenged by a tough editor (Barbara Barrie) to explore new literary frontiers. Meanwhile, Esther and her summer roommate, Southern party girl Doreen (Mary Louise Weller), fall into steamy situations like a threesome with an overbearing disc jockey (Robert Klein). Esther’s emotional troubles manifest suddenly, since the filmmakers fail to convey the textures of Esther’s inner life, so it’s hard to grasp why she’s so unhappy about a summer filled with excitement and opportunities.

          Eventually, Esther returns home to her needy mother (Julie Harris), and Esther’s anguish over falling off the fast track to success drives her to attempt self-destruction. This implied cause-and-effect relationship insults the source material and the subject matter, and the dubious interpretation is exacerbated by Hassett’s weak performance. Though Hassett clearly gave this project her all, she simply can’t summon the darkness needed to bring this character to life. Having said all that, The Bell Jar is quite compelling if one overlooks the gulf between what the movie should have been and what the movie actually is, simply because the underlying story is arresting and lurid. And, to the filmmakers’ credit, their contrived finale, which involves a disturbing reunion between Esther and her college pal Joan (Donna Mitchell), has a painful poetry the rest of the picture lacks.

The Bell Jar: FUNKY