1980 Week: How to Beat the High Co$t of Living

          Cut from the same financial-panic cloth as Fun With Dick and Jane (1977) and 9 to 5 (1980), this adequate comedy depicts the extreme measures that three suburban women take in order to keep up with inflation even as their respective incomes fluctuate. Competently made and filled with strong actors, the piece ambles its way through uninspired episodes punctuated with weak jokes. Every actor in the cast has done better work elsewhere, and with all due respect to her terrific work on the small screen, How to Beat the High Co$t of Living quickly proved that Saturday Night Live alumna Jane Curtin was not destined to be a movie star. She’s droll and sexy in what amounts to the film’s leading role, but her costars—Jessica Lange and Susan Saint James—eclipse her in terms of glamour and pithiness, respectively. It says a lot about the picture that the most dynamic performances actually come from two supporting players, Richard Benjamin and Dabney Coleman.

          Cowritten and coproduced by Robert Kaufman, the movie takes a mosaic approach to explaining why three female friends end up in the same desperate situation at the same time. After Elaine (Curtin) is dumped by her husband, she’s left in a financial lurch because of her extravagant lifestyle. Meanwhile, divorcée Jane (Saint James) tries in vain to cover expenses for herself, her kids, and her aging father (Eddie Albert). And Louise (Lange) fares so poorly operating an antique store that her husband, a veterinarian named Albert (Benjamin), sues her in order to compel her into personal bankruptcy. Together, the women hatch a scheme to rob a “money ball” that’s on display in a local shopping center, so predictable shenanigans result from amateurs attempting a heist.

          Most of what happens in How to Beat the High Cost of Living is mildly amusing at best. Worse, the movie’s would-be sexy subplot—Elaine’s various encounters with a horny cop named Jack (Coleman)—culminate in a tacky scene of Elaine performing a striptease in the middle of the shopping center. Yes, the sexual politics of How to Beat the Cost of Living are so creaky that one of the film’s heroines saves the day by flashing her breasts. Curtin does well in edgy scenes but lacks warmth, Lange looks gorgeous but seems bored with the trite material, and Saint James fares best of the three by playing light comedy well. Unfortunately, the three women never quite gel into a cohesive unit.

How to Beat the High Co$t of Living: FUNKY

All That Jazz (1979)

          Inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2  (1963), All That Jazz is Bob Fosse’s arresting rumination on the limitations of his own character and talent, seen through the prism of an onscreen doppelganger. The movie depicts a tumultuous chapter in the life of film director/choreographer/theater director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), who juggles the challenges of transforming a hokey stage musical into something fresh with long hours spent obsessively refining his latest movie, a biopic about a comedian that echoes Fosse’s Lenny (1974). Gideon also juggles intense relationships with several women, including a wife (Leland Palmer) and a girlfriend (Ann Reinking) driven to distraction by Gideon’s infidelities. Yet the protagonist’s true love might actually be Death, portrayed as an angelic beauty by Jessica Lange, because since his earliest days as a youth performer in raunchy burlesque shows (as shown in stylized dream sequences/flashbacks), Gideon’s been fascinated by the high-wire act of risking disastrous failure in order to chase extraordinary success. He’s also deeply aware of his own shortcomings, afraid of being discovered as a fraud who squanders his talent, and, as one insightful friend notes, terrified that in the final analysis, he might be—horror of horrors!—“ordinary.”
          The plentiful parallels to Fosse’s real life accentuate just how unflattering a self-portrait Fosse paints: Gideon is a perfectionist, philandering, pill-popping pain in the ass whom friends and colleagues somehow love anyway, because he’s so damn interesting and talented. So like Gideon, Fosse does a high-wire act, seeking to balance ego-tripping narcissism and merciless self-analysis. As a result, All That Jazz a film of rare psychological complexity and depth. Scheider gives the most nuanced and surprising performance of his career, beautifully depicting every contradictory aspect of the main character; the decidedly nonmusical performer even dives headfirst into a full-on musical number, and looks graceful guiding dancers through their moves (with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Fosse-style). Fosse cast real-life dancers Palmer and Reinking in the principal female roles, because their characters communicate with Gideon through exquisite body language, and few films integrate dance as fully into storytelling as All That Jazz, which seethes with the eroticism of artists whose bodies are their lives.
          Fosse justifies his razzle-dazzle reputation by presenting tasty clips from Gideon’s film-in-progress as well as a handful of jaw-dropping musical numbers, the standout of which is “Take Off With Us,” a nudity-drenched showstopper about casual sex that only the wicked Fosse could conceive and execute. All That Jazz tends to polarize viewers, with some dismissing it as an overwrought exercise in navel-gazing, but I’m among the partisans who consider it one of the sharpest character studies ever filmed. Watch for Wallace Shawn in a funny bit as a bean-counting producer, John Lithgow as a pompous theater director forever overshadowed by Gideon’s accomplishments, and the great actor/dancer Ben Vereen as an entertainer who takes showbiz obsequiousness to an otherworldly extreme.

All That Jazz: OUTTA SIGHT

King Kong (1976)

          With director John Guillermin’s austere camerawork and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr.’s tongue-in-cheek wordplay leavening the histrionics producer Dino De Laurentiis obviously had in mind, this notorious picture tries to rethink a Hollywood classic as a blend of social commentary and epic tragedy. (Chances are you don’t need to be reminded that the 1933 original is a creature feature depicting the discovery and capture of a giant ape living on a remote island.) The most effective bit of updating is providing a credible reason for American explorers to visit mythical, mist-enshrouded Skull Island: the promise of untapped oil reserves. The picture was made just after the 1973-1974 gas crisis, so the lust for crude was prominent in the American consciousness.
          The least effective bit of updating is the application of Ms. Magazine feminism onto Jessica Lange’s character Dwan, an admirable but failed attempt to make the female lead more assertive than Fay Wray was in the 1933 original. Playing a shipwreck victim who joins the oil expedition and captures the big primate’s heart once she goes ashore with the crew, Lange is so pretty and curvaceous it’s not hard to understand why the ape goes ape. Unfortunately, her performance is as cringe-worthy as Dwan’s dialogue, so King Kong nearly ended the actress’ career before it began.
          However, the portrayal of Kong is heartfelt in a clunky sort of way, especially with John Barry’s alternately menacing and sweeping score jacking up the emotional stakes, and some the movie’s jolts work just like they should. The hit-and-miss special effects feature silly gimmicks like monkey specialist Rick Baker cavorting in an ape suit, plus impressive animatronic monsters created by Carlo Rimbaldi; one memorable scene features a bloody fight between Kong and a ginormous snake with Dwan caught in the middle of the carnage. All of this made a big impression on me as a ’70s kid, which might explain why I still enjoy the movie—but as it happens, I’ve gotten into an embarrassing situation or two by admitting my admiration, like the time I shared my secret Kong shame with classic-cinema champion Leonard Maltin. He was a good sport as I explained that I first saw the movie when I was 7, but he wasn’t buying what I was selling.
          Nonetheless, in defense of this much-maligned movie, I can attest that the 1976 Kong looks gorgeous because Guillermin knows how to fill a widescreen frame like nobody’s business, and Jeff Bridges, all hippy-dippy shaggy as a bleeding-heart naturalist who stows away on the ship headed for Skull Island, contributes an energized performance. Charles Grodin is terrifically hammy as the villain who unwisely tries to exploit Kong, and familiar ’70s players Rene Auberjonois and John Randolph lend flavor as members of his crew. Furthermore, the ending of the 1976 version amplifies the intensity of the original film’s conclusion, replacing a daytime dogfight atop the Empire State Building with an eerie nighttime shootout atop the then-new World Trade Center.
          So, while not a great movie by any stretch, the 1976 Kong has more going for it than you might remember—but keep the fast-forward button handy for the awkward romantic scenes between Kong and Dwan. You’ve been warned.

King Kong: FUNKY