Mommie Dearest and The Swimmer: Two Bizarre Films by Frank Perry

Mommie Dearest, by Frank Perry, 1981
Mommie Dearest probably needs no introduction. It's a true camp classic, with one of the greatest over-the-top performances in movie history: Faye Dunaway as unhinged screen legend Joan Crawford is a sight to behold. It's the "true"? story of Christina Crawford, Joan's adopted daughter, who suffered a lifetime of verbal and psychological abuse by her crazy movie star mother. I'm sure there is actually a good deal of truth to the story, but the movie and its star are just so excessive that I can't imagine it played out like this in real life.

Even if you haven't seen Mommie Dearest before, scenes and lines have become part of pop culture. I'm sure we all know the "No More Wire Hangers" line, right? I feel kind of bad for Faye Dunaway, for being so ashamed of this role. It's a tour de force, whether she acknowledges it or not. She really transforms herself into Joan Crawford, and when Crawford goes crazy, Dunaway is hilariously and delightfully watchable. I know that's probably not what she intended to be, but we've seen Network, Chinatown, and Bonnie and Clyde, so we know Faye Dunaway can act. And act she does. And act and act and act. Nobody told her she was acting in a comedy.

Mommie Dearest is a rare instance of a studio putting a new spin on their marketing of a movie. When audiences at screenings laughed throughout, Paramount decided to sell it as high camp, and made a tidy profit on it. We all know that Dunaway wasn't happy. I wonder what director Frank Perry thought of it. I kind of get the sense that that was what he was going for all along, but who knows? There's a scene toward the end when 20-something Christina falls ill and her 60-year-old mother fills in for her on the soap opera she was acting on while she recovers. That's hilarious! And I felt like Frank Perry was aware of the humor of it all.

Regardless of whether it was meant to be funny or not, Mommie Dearest is one of the most insane movies ever made. Utterly tasteless, but undeniably watchable. Its cult status is well earned.

The Swimmer, by Frank Perry, 1968
After seeing Mommie Dearest, I was curious about the work of Frank Perry, so I sought out his 1968 film, The Swimmer, adapted from a John Cheever short story. It's a surreal, allegorical tale about Ned (Burt Lancaster), a successful man who decides to swim home through all the swimming pools across the county. On his journey through his neighbors' backyards, Ned encounters many people from his past, and has discussions with them, where more and more about his own nature is revealed, before swimming through their pools and running to the next yard. As the movie progresses, we realize, along with Ned, that he isn't the happy, successful, pleasant man he at first seemed to be.

The Swimmer is very much a piece of late sixties weirdness. It hasn't endured or held up the same way a lot of the major movies from that time period have. It kind of shares some themes with The Graduate. Not only the whole swimming pool thing, but also the notion that our ideas of success and The American Dream have become rather hollow, an idea very much prevalent in the 1960's.

I found The Swimmer to be an interesting film, but not a great one. This may come as a surprise, but this movie by the director of Mommie Dearest is NOT the most subtle of allegories. Everything is really on-the-nose, and you feel like he is driving the point home by repeatedly punching your face with it. As the narrative progresses, Ned, having been swimming, running half naked through the woods, and realizing what a piece of shit he is all day, starts getting colder and colder. By the end of it, he's basically holding out his fists and yelling "NOOOOOOOOOOO!", like Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith.

Still, The Swimmer is at least an interesting artifact of its time, and worth noting for that. They don't make movies like it now, and there was really only a brief period where they did.

Diamonds are Forever

Here it is, folks. The moment you've all been waiting for: The final James Bond movie to star Sean Connery. Unless you count Never Say Never Again, which I don't, because it's produced by a different studio and not a part of the actual series. This brings the series I started in December full circle. If you wish to read the rest, here they are:

- Dr. No
- From Russia with Love
- Goldfinger
- Thunderball
- You Only Live Twice
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service

And now, finally, comes Diamonds are Forever. I don't know what brought Sean Connery back to the role of Bond ($$$) after retiring from the role with You Only Live Twice ($$$), but I'm betting it had something to do with getting a great script ($$$), or the promise of a chance to play a different side of 007 after the life-changing events of the previous movie ($$$), or possibly the opportunity to work with Goldfinger director Guy Hamilton again ($$$). Whatever the reason, Connery is back as Bond... with a vengeance!

After the events of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, highlight for SPOILER His wife was murdered SPOILER, 007 has an axe to grind with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, nefarious criminal leader of SPECTRE. The movie opens with Bond tearing his way across the world, tracking down Blofeld by choking henchwomen with their bikini tops and such. He finds Blofeld before the credits, trying to alter one of his men to look like him, to use as a decoy and escape Bond's vengeance. Bond gets him anyway, before the opening titles, and the viewer is robbed of the exciting, take no prisoners James Bond movie they were hoping for.

After that, Bond is pretty much fine, and ready to take on a mission again. He is assigned to pose as a diamond smuggler and follow the diamonds to their destination, in order to uncover the smuggling ring. The main Bond girl this time is Tiffany Case, played by Jill St. John, a fellow diamond smuggler who likes to wear wigs, apparently.

Bond traces the diamonds to their source, which is, of course, Blofeld, who plans to build a reflective laser satellite with them to take over the world. Oh hey, remember when Bond got his vengeance earlier? Well, that cooled him off some, since he's taking all this pretty lightly now. I would have expected all of those emotions to come rushing back, but Bond is over his pain and has moved on to his next girl already.

Diamonds are Forever is by far the campiest James Bond movie yet. It is loaded with dumb gags that betray the clever humor of the series' best entries. Among the worst is a scene where, on the run from some henchmen in Nevada, Bond storms onto the set of a moon mission being faked, steals the moon rover and takes off in it. Come on, guys! The space program was real just two movies ago, when you had Blofeld stealing rocket ships.

This movie is also the origin of the scene where Bond gets caught in some sort of death trap and manages to get out of it unscathed, calmly brushing dust off of his tuxedo or something. That's my least favorite version of James Bond. I like it when Bond gets messed up a little, not the guy who can casually walk through a gunfight sipping a martini.

And there's more. Cake bombs. Bickering gay assassins. Blofeld dressing in drag.

I've enjoyed the first six 007 movies to varying degrees, some less than others, but Diamonds are Forever is the first one that is downright crappy. They don't even give us a proper showdown between Bond and Blofeld at the end. After avoiding Bond's grasp for six movies, the final confrontation amounts to Bond swinging him around in a crane for a while, then leaving.

I think this is it for now. I hope you enjoyed my James Bond reviews. One day I plan on continuing on with the Roger Moore series, but this one kind of killed my will to go on, at least for the time being. With a new movie coming out later this year, though, I can't imagine these reviews being gone for too long.

James Moore will be back (someday) with his review of LIVE AND LET DIE

Xanadu

Mostly, I like to watch good movies, or movies that I think I will like. Sometimes, I like to watch bad movies, too, but only the ones that still provide some kind of weird entertainment value to them. Surely you guys know what I'm talking about. So bad it's funny. I especially enjoy bad movies like Xanadu, bizarre artifacts from a forgotten time. Movies you can show somebody and say "See, Timmy? (His name is Timmy) This is what a bad idea looked like in 1980."

Xanadu is the only Olivia Newton-John/Electric Light Orchestra Rollerskating Disco Musical Dance Showcase ever made, and for that reason, it is a unique jewel of crappiness that deserves our respect. We are never going to get another movie like this.

Kira (Olivia Newton-John) is one of the Greek Muses, released with her sisters from a painting on a building to go out and inspire. After dancing around, she runs into Sonny, an aspiring artist, who has all of the talent but none of the inspiration. At the start of the film, he is returning to his job at a company that paints album covers, after attempting and failing to embark on his own path. Not long after, he recognizes the same mysterious girl in a photograph that he is assigned to paint and decides to track her down.

I'm a little confused about the record album cover painting job. They already had photographs, why was he painting photoreal copies of them? Was there something I was missing?

Anyway, in his search for Kira, she guides him to Gene Kelly, playing a former song-and-dance man and club owner, also being inspired by the Muse. Together Sonny and Gene Kelly hatch a plan to open Xanadu, a new club that combines the Big Bands of the 1940's with the Rock and Roll Bands of the 1980's. And also roller skates. This is demonstrated in an painfully long dance musical number where a stage with a goofy rock band and a stage with a goofy Big Band combine and form SOMETHING ENTIRELY NEW!

So Sonny and Kira fall in love, but once the inspiration is given, she must move on. He follows her into the painting on the building, which is the most disappointing portrayal of Olympus in movie history and plead with Zeus and Hera to let her return.

It's ridiculous, I know. It's also totally innocent and in earnest, which is, in my mind, better than those bad movies that stink of cynicism and exploitation and making a buck. There were even a couple things about it that I genuinely liked. ELO was a good band, and there are one or two songs in there that I enjoyed, including the title song at the end. There's also a pretty great musical number, beautifully animated by the legendary Don Bluth. It reminded me a lot of the transformation sequences in The Sword in the Stone, which Bluth also worked on.

I felt the worst for Gene Kelly. The guy proves in the movie that he still has the skills. It's too bad that in his old age, he had to demonstrate his moves in a movie like this. They put him in some pretty embarrassing outfits and stuff. I hope he at least had fun and I'm not just projecting my embarrassment onto him.

So, I guess I could say that Xanadu is the best Olivia Newton-John/Electric Light Orchestra Rollerskating Disco Musical Dance Showcase I've ever seen. I'm glad to have finally seen it, in the way that it's kind of a pop cultural touchstone. But it doesn't even come close to the level of amazing badness of another disco musical I know of: The Apple. If you are the type who enjoys watching shitty movies with your friends, skip right past Xanadu and watch The Apple. Xanadu is a curiosity at best. The Apple is a hilarious crime against humanity.

You Only Live Twice

Welcome to another installment of my series of James Bond reviews in chronological order. If you would like to read my previous entries, please follow the links: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball.

You Only Live Twice is the fifth James Bond film, again starring Sean Connery as 007. It's directed by Lewis Gilbert, a newcomer to Ian Fleming's universe. It quite literally rockets past Thunderball as the most expensive, and the most excessive, James Bond film up to this point. I chose the above poster to represent this movie in order to prove that point. Yes, there's a sequence where Q assembles a sweet ass portable helicopter for Bond, followed by a big crazy helicopter dogfight. And that's not all!

This time around, Bond, after faking his death in order to get off of SPECTRE's hit list, is sent to Japan to investigate a stolen spacecraft that landed in the Pacific nearby. A stolen spacecraft. See, Spectre is trying to escalate the cold war by using their own, larger spacecraft to eat American and Russian spacecrafts and have each country cast the blame on the other.

This is actually a pretty important James Bond film for a few reasons. First and foremost, we are introduced to 007's arch-nemesis, evil mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance), seen in 3 of the previous 4 films as only a pair of hands stroking a cat. We are also introduced to his secret evil mastermind headquarters located inside a volcano. This is the reason villains always build bases inside volcanos! The base itself served as the inspiration for Dr. Evil's base in the first Austin Powers film.

There's a lot more silliness to go around in this movie, including a scene where Bond has his face "altered" to look Japanese. He has some prosthetic eyelids put on and brushes his hair forward. The effect is less than impressive. The finale is also pure craziness, where Bond and an army of NINJAS invade Blofeld's volcano base! This is a dream come true. It was also parodied brilliantly in You Only Move Twice, my personal all-time favorite Simpsons episode, guest starring Albert Brooks as loveable-boss-slash-diabolical-terrorist, Hank Scorpio.

As ridiculous and over the top as You Only Live Twice gets, it's probably the most fun of the first five. Not the BEST, mind you, and also not my favorite, but it's loaded with action and camp value. The script is written by Roald Dahl, best known for childrens books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr. Fox, and he brings a level of cleverness to the story that balances out the ridiculousness.

It only took a few movies, but by this point there is absolutely no attempt to ground James Bond in any kind of reality. You Only Live Twice is pure escapism, and I can't fault it for that.

James Moore will be back with his review of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.

Invaders from Mars

Possibly the most misleading tagline I've ever seen is the above, "A Nightmarish Answer to The Wizard of Oz!" Invaders from Mars has nothing whatsoever to do with The Wizard of Oz. Not a single similarity. And it came out 15 years later, too, so it wasn't even striking while the iron was hot. This is like if a marketing campaign for Thor boldly declared it, "A Thrilling Tribute to My Best Friend's Wedding!"

William Cameron Menzies' Invaders from Mars was a movie for little boys made in a time where science fiction was believed to only be interesting to little boys. I assume little boys in the 50's had very low standards because they had never seen Star Wars, and this was all they could get. There's a little bit of body snatchers Cold War paranoia thrown into the mix as well.

The story follows a little 50's kid, not unlike every other 50's kid, with his "gee whiz!" and his "neato!", who sees a UFO landing by a fence outside the house. He tells his parents. His father goes out to check on it to placate him, and he disappears. After a short panic, and calling the police, the dad turns up, but his behavior is slightly off.

By slightly off, I mean he's mean and cranky, and he just totally swats the kid in the face and knocks him down. The weird thing about this part is from the context, it doesn't feel like the audience was supposed to react with "OH MY GOD, THE DAD JUST SMACKED HIS KID", they're supposed to think, "Strange, the dad just smacked his kid, and he barely even had a good reason."

So, the kid knows something is up with his parents, and the police are acting weird too, so he needs to find someone who believes him. This leads to an astronomer, a pretty lady, and an army guy. They're the kid's allies, but they all talk to him very condescendingly, the way that would have made me angry when I was that age. There's a part where the kid tells an army guy to "please hurry", and the army guy, saying nothing, reaches over and pats the kid on the head, then drives away. Together, these people must stop an alien invasion and save his mom and dad. By which, I mean, describe what other people are doing while they stand around doing nothing.

And that's the thing. The movie was made for next to no money, obviously, and as a result, we don't see anything happen. Or we see stock footage. There's even a car chase that never shows two cars on camera at the same time, because getting two cars would have cost too much. The spaceship is conveniently hidden underground and accessed through a sandtrap.

The first three quarters of the movie is like this. Long, static shots of characters standing still and talking about things that are only interesting if we see them. Finally in the last 15 minutes or so, there's some action. We see some aliens. They're basically two guys in loose-fitting, green jumpsuits that even cover their faces and actually look rather cozy. And a betentacled head in a jar that looks a lot like Tony Harrison from The Mighty Boosh.


I have no idea how this could have held a kid's attention. But the filmmakers had an idea: TANKS. TANKS TANKS TANKS. They cram in as much stock footage of army men transporting tanks as humanly possible. "Daddy, they've been talking for 20 minutes, when is something going to happen --TANKS!"

I don't know if I'm being hard on it. I probably am. It's considered a B-Movie classic of sorts. I guess it's because of the Cold War paranoia. The thing is, it's just the standard American reaction of "These aliens are invading, so we better shoot the shit out of them and then blow them away to the land of explodia!" (my words, not theirs)

Other, better Cold War-era sci-fi movies from around this time have a much more urgent message. The Day the Earth Stood Still has the whole "we have to make peace or we will all be destroyed" ultimatum. Gojira had the utter terror that comes with a nuclear explosion, and the hero who is willing to sacrifice himself to make sure his destructive weapon doesn't fall into military hands.

I didn't really enjoy this movie, even on a campy level. It has a couple moments here and there, I guess. It wins a point or two for historical context. There are much more enjoyable movies from this period, both for their goodness and their badness. This one didn't work for me. D

Starcrash

I had planned on watching a whole bunch of movies on a train ride this weekend. I only managed to watch one, and that movie was the camp classic Starcrash. How do I best describe Starcrash? Let's see... Remember the Simpsons joke where Mr. Burns said "Get me Steven Spielberg," and Smithers says "he's not available, sir," and Mr. Burns says, "then get me his non-union, Mexican equivalent!"? Starcrash is Star Wars made by George Lucas' non-union, Italian equivalent, Georgino Lucasetti, who, incidentally, has never seen Star Wars.

Starcrash follows the adventures of scantily-clad space outlaw Stella Starr, on a planet hopping journey along with a weird psychic guy with a jew-fro, a robot with a strangely out-of-place accent, and a young David Hasselhoff. If that doesn't pique your interest, then this movie is not for you.

It's kind of a hard movie for me to judge. I watched it alone, and movies like this are always so much better with friends. As a so-bad-it's-good movie, it has it's moments, but overall, I think it's just OK. The acting is laughable, as are the special effects. Stella Starr's performance is like if a porn star was acting in a kids' TV show. The robot's voice is baffling, and he has some hilarious lines. The jew-fro guy might have been the funniest.

Starcrash would work as a great first movie in a double bill with Barbarella. You would definitely want to save Barbarella for last, though, because that movie is just divine. Barbarella manages to be hilarious and subversive both on purpose and unintentionally, it manages to create a unique and fun space-fantasy universe, and it does so in that wonderful, sexy, mid-60's mod style. Starcrash, on the other hand, oozes that 70's feeling, where everything and everyone looks covered in a coat of oil. Not nearly so appealing. Stella Starr is no Jane Fonda.

Both movies do have one thing in common, something that a lot of European B-movies share: Very good music.

Also, I'm not one hundred percent sure, but I think this movie might have fans in the industry. I recognized bits that I thought might have been referenced in Roman Coppola's CQ and Luc Besson's The Fifth Element.

So I guess my verdict on Starcrash is still undecided. I enjoyed watching it, but I think I might have liked it more with some friends present. Still, it's worthwhile if you like cult movies, bad movies, and camp classics. I will probably watch it again.

No grade for this one. I don't think I can objectively grade a movie I'm watching for all the wrong reasons.