Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975)

          A lovely story about aging, identity, and romance, offbeat telefilm Queen of the Stardust Ballroom features a multidimensional leading performance by Maureen Stapleton, as well as a touching supporting turn from Charles Durning. Both were nominated for Emmys. Tracking the experiences of a woman in late middle age who struggles to build a new life after the death of her husband, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom explores the tender theme of how difficult it is to reconcile the disappointments of life with the desire to live happily, especially when the passage of time creates limitations. The central conceit involves dance, because the widow discovers new joy by visiting a ballroom where old songs provide the soundtrack, so there’s a certain innate elegance to the piece—among other things, the movie revels in the irony that heavyset Durning was light on his feet. Had the filmmakers presented their story without extraneous adornment, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom would have been a near-perfect gem. Alas, the filmmakers elected to make Queen of the Stardust Ballroom into a musical, with characters talk-singing several original tunes by the songwriting team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman. The songs are fine in and of themselves, but they diminish the movie’s verisimilitude instead of adding, as was undoubtedly the intention, to the story’s magic.

          The narrative begins with Bea Asher (Stapleton) losing her husband and beginning a lonely new life in her empty house in the Bronx. Her adult daughter lives in the suburbs, and her adult son relocates to Los Angeles. Determined to stay in the house where she’s lived for decades, Bea opens a junk shop but remains desperately lonely until a friend recommends she visit the Stardust Ballroom. That’s where Bea meets portly mailman Al Green (Durning). They connect through dancing and eventually become a couple, but problems—including judgment from Bea’s relatives—soon challenge their happiness. Through it all, writer Jerome Kass emphasizes the combination of excitement and fear Bea experiences every time she steps outside her comfort zone. Yet Queen of the Stardust Ballroom isn’t some manipulative piece about being young at heart; rather, it’s a bittersweet meditation on finding fulfillment no matter what compromised form it takes.

          Director Sam O’Steen, an Oscar-nominated film editor who helmed a handful of projects for the big and small screens, applies an unobtrusive style to the film’s storytelling, keeping the focus during dramatic scenes on the expressive faces of his actors and letting wide shots during dance scenes display figures gliding across the ballroom floor while lights bounce off the facets of a glitter ball. More than anything, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom is an actors’ piece, with the deep humanity that Stapleton and Durning bring to their roles infusing every scene. As for the songs, some are more jarring than others, though, to the Bergmans’ credit, Stapleton’s first number, “How Could You Do This To Me?”, sets up her character well. The songs are not the film’s best element, but they’re not egregious.

Queen of the Stardust Ballroom: GROOVY

The Gathering (1977)

          A Christmas drama that embraces family-friendly themes but eschews cheap sentimentality, The Gathering concerns a clan brought together by impending tragedy. When bullheaded, self-involved patriarch Adam Thornton (Ed Asner) receives a terminal diagnosis, he decides to visit each of his far-flung adult children one last time. He also resolves to make peace with his wife, from whom he is separated. Adam’s doctor forbids him to travel, so Adam’s wife, Kate (Maureen Stapleton), proposes a gathering at the family home instead. Yet because Adam finds the idea of pity appalling, he insists that his medical condition be kept secret. Kate calls the kids home, somewhat ingeniously letting them entertain fantasies that their parents will reconcile. From there, the drama proceeds methodically but with great speed. Adam’s children initially resist the idea of a gathering, some because they resent the way he treated Kate in the past, and some because they dread arguments. For one of Adam’s children, coming home is fraught with political implications, because Bud (Gregory Harrison) deserted the U.S. for Canada to avoid the Vietnam-era draft, a decision that caused a painful rift between Bud and his staunchly patriotic father. Other subplots are more pedestrian, as with the son-in-law embarrassed because he’s not a good provider and the eldest son embittered by his father’s withholding nature. Still, quite a bit of material gets crammed into 94 minutes.

          As directed by Randal Klesier, whose previous TV-movie successes include The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976) and who soon graduated to big-budget features with Grease (1978), The Gathering is like a consolidated version of a soapy miniseries. Most of the characters and conflicts are indicated rather than fully explored, so critical viewers might find the picture superficial and unsatisfying. For those willing to accept the piece on its terms, the reductive approach works quite well. As the title suggests, The Gathering isn’t about the various aspects of tension within the Thornton family so much as it’s about the unique power of holiday get-togethers. For some of the siblings, returning home is about recapturing childhood. For others, it’s about settling scores. And for some, it’s about taking stock and, if possible, building bridges.

          The Gathering says something bittersweet about Christmas and, on a larger level, all the holiday celebrations that make the final months of the calendar emotional. Watching a year fade into the past forces one to ask what’s been gained and what’s been lost with the passage of time, and it reminds one to consider how the future can be made better than the past. Through the simple device of exploring a specific individual’s mortality, this effective telefilm expresses a humane message about impermanence and love. Asner’s performance drives the piece, his character’s warmth struggling to penetrate a gruff exterior, and Stapleton matches him with wounded compassion. Adept supporting players include Bruce Davison, Stephen Pressman, John Randolph, Gail Strickland, and Edward Winter, though the film’s biggest star may be composer John Barry. His exquisite main theme captures everything the picture tries to say about the difficulty people encounter when striving for transcendence. The Gathering received five Emmy nominations, winning one for Outstanding Special, and a sequel, The Gathering, Part II, aired in 1979.

The Gathering: GROOVY

The Runner Stumbles (1979)

          The final film directed by self-appointed cinematic moralist Stanley Kramer, this peculiar drama presents a sensationalistic story in a manner that ranges from absurdly lighthearted to absurdly overwrought. To be fair, most scenes occupy a palatable middle ground of rationality and restraint. Nonetheless, the extremes define this piece, as does the suffocating artificiality that permeates every scene, whether the scene in question is bad, good, or indifferent. To get a sense of why this picture is simultaneously respectable and ridiculous, The Runner Stumbles stars jovial song-and-dance man Dick Van Dyke as a middle-aged priest suspected of not only sleeping with a pretty young nun, but also of murdering her—not exactly “Chim Chim Cher-ee” territory. And when Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz (1939), shows up to represent the full weight of religious authority, The Runner Stumbles approaches self-parody.

          Set in a remote part of Michigan circa 1911, and based loosely upon a true story, the picture begins with Father Rivard (Van Dyke) fetching his parish’s latest addition, fresh-faced Sister Rita (Kathleen Quinlan), from a transit station. They strike sparks immediately, because she’s challenging and curious while he’s a bundle of conflicts—on one hand, he’s a stickler for rules and tradition since he’s tired of fighting the church establishment, and on the other hand, he’s a passionate freethinker who once imagined a more important destiny for himself. Rita’s attitude represents a bracing change from the two sickly older nuns she was hired to assist, and Rita soon raises eyebrows by teaching secular songs to local children. Later, when the older nuns contract tuberculosis, Rivard suggest that Rita move into his residence, thereby separating her from contagions. This scandalizes everyone involved, from Rivard’s devout housekeeper, Mrs. Shandig (Maureen Stapleton), to the monsignor with authority over Rivard’s parish, Nicholson (Bolger). The fraught scenario climaxes in a noisy final act comprising a fire, illicit sex, and a trial shot through with venomous accusations. Framing the main storyline is a recurring courtroom sequence featuring Rivard—incarcerated on suspicion of murder after Rita’s body is discovered—receiving counsel from his inexperienced young lawyer, Toby Felker (Beau Bridges).

          Excepting Bridges’ loose and naturalistic work, everything about The Runner Stumbles is old-fashioned and sterile. Quinlan plays her role like Shirley Temple with mood swings, utterly failing to make Rita’s dangerous instability seem credible. Van Dyke is equally stiff in many scenes, though he paints colors of bitterness and rage with surprising skill. Unfortunately, Van Dyke is so broad and theatrical during the film’s crucial trial scene that he undercuts his few good moments elsewhere. That’s why the abrupt and unsatisfying ending doesn’t really matter: It’s just one more false note in an atonal symphony.

The Runner Stumbles: FUNKY

Lost and Found (1979)

          Despite being made by the same creative team as A Touch of Class (1973), which received four Oscar nominations and won a Best Actress prize for leading lady Glenda Jackson, the middling romantic comedy Lost and Found did not enjoy as warm a reception. Although Jackson and her Touch of Class costar, George Segal, both deliver highly professional comic performances, the script by Melvin Frank (who also directed) and Jack Rose is screechy and strained, wobbling between half-hearted slapstick sequences and overwritten dialogue scenes. Worse, both of the film’s lead characters come across as demanding, nasty, and smug, so there’s not much pleasure to be found in watching their courtship. Accordingly, while the movie is handsomely made and peppered with bright moments, the overall enterprise feels unnecessarily laborious. Adding insult to injury, Lost and Found also comes across as a hyperactive strain of the same narrative DNA that playwright/screenwriter Neil Simon explored much more effectively in a subsequent 1979 release, Chapter Two. Both movies try to amuse and touch audiences in similar ways, but Lost and Found tries harder and with less success, making for a somewhat tiresome viewing experience.

          Lost and Found starts at a European ski resort, where American professor Adam (Segal) and British divorcée Tricia (Jackson) crash into each other—twice!—in a wheezy example of the romantic-comedy staple, the “meet-cute.” After transitioning from acrimony to affection, the couple marries and returns to Adam’s home in the U.S., where he teaches at a small college. Marital strife ensues, because Adam hides several important facts from his new bride: He doesn’t tell her that his shot at tenure is endangered, that he’s fallen behind on his dissertation, and that one of his research assistants is a former lover. Oh, and he’s also got an overbearing mother, Jemmy (Maureen Stapleton), and a circle of academic friends who degrade themselves by kissing up to administrators. Tricia makes a valiant attempt at learning to love her new circumstances, but once Adam’s duplicity and narcissism become intolerable, she lashes out with barbs and tantrums.

          On the plus side, since writers Frank and Rose both earned their stripes as jokesmiths for Bob Hope, a number of the one-liners in Lost and Found crackle. For instance, the embittered Tricia describes the average nubile home-wrecker as “age 22, bust 38, intelligence negligible.” Frank and Rose also have fun with supporting character Reilly (Paul Sorvino), a motor-mouthed cab driver who becomes important in the movie’s final act. Yet because the myriad extended Jackson-Segal scenes are the main attraction, the absence of magic from those scenes is nearly a fatal flaw.

Lost and Found: FUNKY

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