The Thorn (1971)

Of historical interest exclusively because it contains Bette Midler’s first screen performance, The Thorn is a cheaply made and rather vulgar religious satire created at a moment when the world was rotten with counterculture takes on Biblical lore. In fact, one lame joke in The Thorn involves the narrator explaining that characters are singing “Jesus Christ Superstar” but the sound has been muted for legal reasons. Anyway, The Thorn comprises lots of quick-hit sketches presented with period dress and modern settings, so the material would have been more effective as a stage revue. On film, the nonexistent production values, point-and-shoot cinematography, and undisciplined narrative feel amateurish. Although some of the performances are enthusiastic and a handful of jokes are mildly amusing, the sum effect is dull and episodic. In the movie’s first act, Midler plays the Virgin Mary as a sexually curious young woman. A rabbi mounts her, and when she refers to his phallus as “grace,” he moans, “Hail Mary, full of grace.” You get the idea. Not every joke is raunchy, but all are designed to take the piss out of organized religion and/or other institutions. For instance, during a prologue God is played by a Harpo Marx lookalike, and at the end of the prologue, he pops his head into an MGM-style logo bearing the text “Metro-Golda-Meir.” Random gags of that sort permeate the film, but not in the fun hellzapoppin manner of a Mel Brooks comedy—the vibe is much more “Here’s some shit we thought was funny while he were toking.” The very first thing onscreen in The Thorn is a disclaimer warning those who are easily offended by jokes about the New Testament to leave the theater. A more conscientious version of the disclaimer would also have warned those who are annoyed by jokes that aren’t funny to leave. FYI, once Midler achieved fame as a recording star, this picture was reissued as The Divine Mr. J to play off the title of her debut album, The Divine Miss M (1972). Hopefully not many were snookered.

The Thorn: LAME

1980 Week: Divine Madness

          Bette Midler’s incredible rise to national prominence lost momentum after the release of this concert film, which failed to match her previous success with albums, concerts, singles, television specials, and theatrical features. Happily, a massive comeback began with several hit comedy movies in the mid-’80s and peaked with the tearjerker film Beaches (1988), which spawned the gigantic pop single “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Since then, Midler has achieved the rarified status of being a pop-culture institution. Understanding this context is helpful when considering Divine Madness, which deliberately encapsulates the first decade of Midler’s mainstream success. Lest anyone forget, before Midler conquered the Adult Contemporary charts with saccharine ballads, she made her mark by acting in stage musicals and by performing raunchy comedy/music routines in gay bathhouses.

          Divine Madness, which contains footage captured during four shows of Midler’s 1979 concert tour, attempts to reconcile the many moods of the Divine Miss M. The movie contains boisterous musical performances, lewd stand-up comedy, and even a few serious moments, like a suite of songs from The Rose (1979), the dramatic film that made Midler a movie star. In any other context, these disparate tonalities would seem incompatible, but the point is to show viewers that Midler is a gutter-mouthed broad, a hellacious belter, a sensitive balladeer, and a tender artiste. The film’s only coherence, therefore, stems from demonstrating Midler’s incredible versatility. Given the anything-goes approach, however, it’s no surprise that some parts of Divine Madness fall flat.

          A pantomime bit in which Midler portrays a bag lady is cringe-inducing because of its hokey sentimentality, and Midler’s voice frays during overblown rock numbers including her spins on Bob Seger’s “Fire Down Below” and Bruce Springsteen’s “The E Street Shuffle.” Yet Midler summons real fire on a medley of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and her performance of “The Rose,” complete with artful hand movements, is moving. Similarly, many of the crass sequences are droll if not exactly delightful. Midler seems utterly without inhibition as she interacts with the largely male audience at a theater in Pasadena. (Before exposing her bra, she good-naturedly asks the crowd: “Oh, you wanna see more of my tits?”)

          Midler steamrolls through jokes in a machine-gun style borrowing from Mae West and other Vaudeville icons, and she even introduces one sequence by warning that the quality of the jokes is about to dramatically decrease. As the saying goes, it’s all in good fun, and that’s ultimately what Midler provides. Divine Madness is an exercise in upbeat escapism, sometimes in the unlikely form of a smiling diva working her way across the stage in a motorized wheelchair while she wears a starfish brassiere and a mermaid tail, her backup singers the Harlettes and her tight rock band giving every tune a sound as big as the star’s personality.

Divine Madness: GROOVY

The Rose (1979)

          Beautiful in moments, harrowing in others, and soulful despite a derivative origin and a preponderance of clichés, The Rose is best remembered as the vehicle that drove singer/actress Bette Midler to international superstardom. In addition to providing Midler with her biggest hit song to date (the film’s poetic title track), The Rose earned the entertainer her first Oscar nomination. Combined with several other Oscar nods and a sold box-0ffice performance, this amount of success represented an unlikely turn of events for a project that seemed destined to fail. Originally developed as a biopic of the late, great rock singer Janis Joplin, the project was fictionalized when negotiations for the use of Joplin’s likeness and music came to naught; furthermore, the producers failed to hire eccentric British director Ken Russell, who had scored a major hit with the rock musical Tommy (1975) and therefore seemed the safe bet for this sort of material.

          Yet these setbacks turned out to be fortuitous, since moving away from Joplin’s life story allowed the screenwriters to create a self-contained mythos for their protagonist, and losing Russell led the producers to Mark Rydell, whose sensitive direction grounds the movie in a way Russell never would have attempted. None of this is to say The Rose is a great movie—quite the contrary, it’s rather average in terms of narrative content, since the storyline essentially throws various rock & roll signifiers into a Cuisinart. However, the picture has coherence thanks to Midler’s impassioned performance, Rydell’s unwavering focus on the tragedy of a performer’s downward spiral, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s elegant cinematography. So, even though The Rose is a simultaneously tarted-up and watered-down version of Joplin’s journey, it’s emotionally arresting.

          The actual plot is simple—as raunchy blues/rock singer Mary Rose Foster becomes famous, the pressure to deliver consistent success drives her toward drinking, drugs, and philandering. By the time she’s a superstar known simply as “The Rose,” her fragile self-image has crumbled, so she rushes toward self-destructive oblivion. The ineffectual men sharing her life include Houston Dyer (Frederick Forrest), a sweet boyfriend whose affections aren’t enough to pull Mary Rose back from the brink, and Rudge Campbell (Alan Bates), a domineering manager whose ambition and greed outstrip his concern for Mary Rose’s welfare.
          The Rose takes its seediness seriously, so Midler is often presented as unattractively as possible, both in terms of her slovenly physical appearance and her screeching tirades during binges. Midler makes these unseemly aspects watchable with the commitment of her acting, though just barely so—were it not for Midler’s innate likability, which shines through even at the worst of times, Mary Rose would be a completely unsympathetic character. After all, one can’t help but ask why Mary Rose doesn’t simply quit when things get awful. Alas, The Rose doesn’t go that deep, so we’re left with a finely textured surface—which is probably enough, at least for a single viewing.
          As for the music, it’s a mixed bag, even though Midler’s vocal performances are astounding from start to finish. The best hard rockers are covers of “real” songs (“Fire Down Below,” “Stay With Me,” “When a Man Loves a Woman”), but the ersatz numbers composed for the movie work fine. And if the title song is a bit too gentle for a Joplin-esque singer’s set list, that’s easy to overlook since Midler’s rendition has so much feeling.

The Rose: GROOVY