Showing posts with label Raf Vallone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Raf Vallone. Show all posts

Friday, May 16, 2014

HARLOW 1965

There, there…just put it out of your mind. Just put it out of your mind that Joseph E. Levine's Harlow will actually have anything whatsoever to do with the life and career of Jean Harlow, the 1930s MGM star and Hollywood's first "blonde bombshell." Don't worry your little head over anything even tangentially redolent of the '30s seeping in to corrode the assertively mid-'60s vibe and aesthetics of this lacquered, $2.5 million soap opera. Dispense with all hope of accuracy—from made-up names to fabricated events, Harlow is an absolute work of fiction. Don't look for logic—Jean Harlow looks exactly the same AFTER her Hollywood glamour makeover as she did when we first meet her as a struggling dress extra. Don't pay any attention to physics—Harlow and her mother appear to be roughly about the same age. And don't search for credibility—Red Buttons plays a near-mythical character: a "Hollywood agent from Mars" of such ludicrous selfless, principled devotion and honesty he makes the denizens of Hogwarts look plausible by comparison.

The question you'll be asking yourself as the movie's end credits roll   


No, Harlow is a market-driven exercise in expediency and exploitation. A movie as artless and willfully artificial as a Dacron® polyester housecoat. Its purpose is neither to pay homage to its titular subject, nor to say anything meaningful about fame, the film industry, or even recognizable human psychology. It is, pure and simple, an act of commerce. A product designed to capitalize on the popularity of Irving Shulman's sleazy 1964 bestseller Harlow: an Intimate Biography, and a project divined as yet another bid in the campaign waged by producer Joseph E. Levine to sell protégé Carroll Baker to the public as successor to the Marilyn Monroe sex symbol throne (Monroe died in 1962).

Over the years, I've found that by accepting Harlow for what it is—a slick, schlock titillation package with no bearing on Hollywood, history, or even reality as we know it—I am then free to get down to the important business at hand: joyfully reveling in Harlow as a campy, satin-covered, marvelously misguided, miscast, multi-million dollar mistake.

Carroll Baker as Jean Harlow
Red Buttons as Arthur Landau
Angels Lansbury as Mama Jean Bello
Peter Lawford as Paul Bern
Mike Connors as Jack Harrison
Martin Balsam as Everett Redman, head of Majestic Pictures
Leslie Nielsen as Richard Manley
Raf Vallone as Marino Bello
For those genuinely interested in the fascinating and brief life of Jean Harlow (she died at age 26 of uremic poisoning), there are several books available that provide a more fact-based overview of the actress' career than Shulman's largely discredited work of biographical fiction. The internet offers a wealth of information in the form of written profiles and video documentaries available on YouTube. But better yet, just check out any one of Jean Harlow's feature films (my favorite, Dinner at Eight) if you want to get a sense of Harlow's unique brand of star quality, and appreciate how she was more persuasive as a gifted light comedienne than a sex goddess.
Look anywhere but to Joseph E. Levine's expensive-but-cheap-looking rush job, filmed at a careless, breakneck speed in an (unsuccessful) attempt to beat a low-budget rival Harlow film to the boxoffice in 1965. (The 2011 book, Dueling Harlows by Tom Lisanti, details how Levine chopped months off of his own film's pre-production schedule when made aware of an independent studio's plans to release a Harlow movie starring sound-alike actress Carol Lynley, and utilizing an inexpensive television-based technology [saddled with the William Castle-esque name of "Electronovision"] requiring no more than an eight-day shooting schedule.)
According to Carroll Baker, filming on Harlow began without a completed script. 
During filming, a feud erupted between Baker and Levine resulting in the termination of her six-picture deal with his Embassy Pictures. An act that led to her suing the producer (and winning) for breach of contract. Levine's revenge was to have a shrill witch of a character named Cheryl Barker--modeled to look just like Baker--appear in his film next film, The Oscar

Truth be told, when it comes to Joseph E. Levine's Harlow, those unfamiliar with the actual life and personage of Jean Harlow will find themselves at a distinct advantage. The movie is a wholesale work of inaccuracy, gossip, and time-tripping anachronisms; the less one knows (especially pertaining to how people dressed and looked in the '20s and '30s), the better. But while Harlow is valueless as historical biography, it's fairly priceless as a laugh-out-loud comedy of the absurd. A shining, overlit example of that uniquely '60s brand of glossy, overwrought melodrama mixed with tentative sleaze. Harlow promised to salaciously blow the lid off the many myths surrounding the life of the silver screen goddess. Yet, little did audiences suspect that the film's taunting tagline: "What was Harlow really like?" was really a literal, non-rhetorical imploration posed by the screenwriter and producer to anyone within earshot. 
The best way to enjoy Harlow is to ignore its allusions to reality and perhaps see it as a show business parable, the second entry, if you will, in Joseph E. Levine's unofficial "Hollywood as Cesspool" trilogy: The Carpetbaggers (1964), Harlow (1965), and The Oscar (1966).
In The Carpetbaggers, Carroll Baker played the Jean Harlow-inspired movie star, Rina Marlowe. In that film, Rina engages in a wild bedroom tussle with Jonas Cord (George Peppard), a character based on Howard Hughes. The movie Harlow affords Baker a second, undisguised go at Jean Harlow in addition to a copycat bedroom scene in which she gets to wrestle around on a bed with another Howard Hughes-based character. This time in the form of Leslie Nielsen as movie mogul Richard Manley (why some porn star hasn't taken the name of Dick Manley by now, I'll never know). 
As evidence of Harlow's hurried production schedule, note the crewmember captured in the marbled glass in the second screencap above. In her 1983 memoir Baby Doll, Carroll Baker recounts tales of filming being so rushed on Harlow that there was no time for rehearsals, the script was being written as they went along, and, barring any major technical gaffes, the printing of first takes was the norm.
It shows! It shows!
Body Talk
Baker seductively shimmies to composer Neal Hefti's song Girl Talk, a marvelous (ragingly chauvinist) bit of '60s light-jazz that incongruously crops up in this scene taking place in the early 1930s. Although the song went on to become a pop standard of the day (but failed to garner Oscar attention), I've never been able to figure out just what this very modern song is doing in this period movie. But why look for logic? Later in this same montage sequence, Baker actually breaks into a spirited 1960s twist!

Screenwriter John Michael Hayes (The Carpetbaggers) decides on Harlow's point of view: "I can either write the story about a girl who slept with everybody to get to the top, or an innocent girl who fought off the wolves, kept her integrity intact, and made it to the top on her own merits. Which do you think?" Baby Doll: An Autobiography- Carroll Baker -1983

Seriously? Those were the only two options?

Hayes, opting for the latter, reduces the entire scope of Harlow's screen legacy to the banal issue of "Will she?" or "Won't she," thereby making this already trite movie even more insipid than it needed to be. Presented as something akin to a human pressure cooker unable to keep the lid on her own overflowing sex appeal, Jean Harlow is introduced rebuffing the advances of a lecherous actor. And the film tirelessly keeps offering up variations on this theme well-nigh for the next two hours.
Made up to look more like '60s-era Marilyn Monroe than Harlow, and carrying on throughout as though she were Ross Hunter-era Doris Day caught in a loop of The Constant Virgin; Baker sports an astonishing number of flattering, form-fitting costumes, and some of the stiffest, ugliest wigs I've ever seen in a major motion picture. 
Jean Harlow and her agent, Arthur Landau, take in the rear-projection scenery
The real moral behind Harlow is that talent agents
are the most trustworthy people in show business

The plot, such as it is, is summed up by the man who discovers Harlow, the only man who sees her as a talent and not a piece of tail--the saintly talent agent Arthur Landau (whose portrayal as a paragon of virtue can be attributed to his being the main information source for Shulman's book). He tells the wannabe star, "You're the sweet, beautiful girl next door. But on fire inside."
And so the die is cast. Through a passive mother (Lansbury), a parasitic stepfather (Vallone), skirt-chasing moguls (Nielsen), matinee idols (Connors), and impotent husbands (Lawford), Harlow is made up of vignettes that keep hammering us over the head with the same message: The world's most famous sex symbol had a lot of trouble with sex in real life. Zzzzzzzzzz.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Anyone familiar with my twisted taste in movies knows that every complaint fired at a film like Harlow is actually a valentine. Bad movies are made all the time, but it's a special kind of art to make a  watchable lousy movie. And for me, Harlow is a bad movie classic. It's so gonzo in its half-baked, "1930s as filtered through a 1960s prism" sensibilities; it reminds me that they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I love every hair on Carroll Baker's ghastly Dynel wig.
The ever-dull Mike Connors (he'll always be "Touch" Connors to me)
plays a Gable-like matinee idol
I love the vulgarity at the core of movies like this. I love the garish sets, the superficial overemphasis on glamour, the tin-eared dialogue, the broad-strokes acting, and thoroughly loopy disregard for period detail. Perhaps it's cruel and reveals a small spirit on my part, but I have a special place in my heart for grandiose flops like this (that's flop in the artistic sense. Harlow, while no blockbuster, did make money). Joseph E. Levine produced a number of my very favorite "good" films (The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, The Lion in Winter), but as the saying goes, when he was bad, he was better. Harlow, along with  The Oscar, Where Love Has Gone (1964), and The Adventurers (1970), are the best of Levine's worst. Just brilliantly gauche, sex-obsessed behemoths that look like the kinds of films Ed Wood, Roger Corman, John Waters, or Paul Morrissey would come up with if they'd been given the budget.
In this scene, we're asked to believe that the rather mature-looking Carroll Baker
 is too young to sign a movie contract without her mother's signature.

PERFORMANCES
While I lost my respect a long time ago for what it meant to be a "Method" actor when I learned that Edy Williams was once a student of Lee Strasberg (yes, THAT Edy Williams of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). Baker puts great stock in her Method training, and indeed, the Oscar-nominated actress (Baby Doll) can be pretty effective under the right circumstances (Giant, Andy Warhol's Bad, Star 80). 
Harlow isn't one of those circumstances. By all accounts, Baker was rushed into this film, exhausted, unwilling, and unprepared. And I'm afraid it shows. Her flat line readings are matched only by her unconvincing display of even the simplest emotions. Of course, given the lines she has to speak, I can't blame her for phoning it in.
The always-wonderful Angela Lansbury is a standout
 in her all-too-brief scenes as Harlow's mother
As is so often the case with female-centric camp-fests like this, the male cast is a dull and sexless bunch. Peter Lawford looks like the walking embodiment of the word "debauched," Raf Vallone has spark, Red Buttons might as well be wearing a sign saying "Nominate me for Best Supporting Actor, please," and Leslie Nielsen proves once again that when it comes to drama, he's a hell of a comic actor. Angela Lansbury, on the other hand, is so good it's as if she'd wandered in from a different movie.
As a fan of Hazel Aiken, the crass, New Jersey hit-woman Carroll Baker played in Andy Warhol's BAD (1977),  I have to say, Baker only shines when she has sarcastic dialogue to deliver. Perhaps working off her feelings about producer Levine, Baker only comes alive (the same can be said for the screenplay) when Harlow requires her character to display contempt for her stepfather, Marino Bello.

Harlow: Cheap, shoddy greaser!
Bello: Nobility runs in my veins.
Harlow: King liar, Prince loafer, Count ne'er do well, Baron loudmouth!

Bello: I'll turn you over my lap and spank some respect into you!
Harlow: I'm too smart to get that close to your lap.

Bello: Perhaps your agent would find a part suitable for me…
Harlow: He only handles people.

Bello: Hey, sweetheart, your paycheck...?
Harlow: There isn't any.
Bello: But I have a horse running at 3 O'clock!
Harlow: Better tell him to walk.

Harlow plays fast and loose with history. Paul Bern (Lawford) is portrayed as
 Harlow's first and only husband. 
In truth, he was the second of three.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
They're called clichés for a reason. Harlow traffics in so many over-familiar melodrama/soap opera tropes, even on first viewing you'll swear you've seen this film before.

The tortured, waking up in a strange bed in a sleazy room with a sleazy stranger, scene 
1. A downsliding (albeit, artfully posed), Harlow reacts in silent horror to the depths to which she's fallen
2. In Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke's less artfully-posed Neely O'Hara doesn't fare much better

 The self-disgusted, "I can't stand the sight of you!" cold cream on the mirror scene
1. Glass in hand, a boozy, bed-hopping Harlow has had her fill of herself
2. In Queen Bee, Joan Crawford finds even she can only tolerate just so much Joan Crawford

The firm and testy "This is for your own good!" avuncular agent intervention scene
1. Harlow's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years
2. Neely's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years
 
The hitting rock bottom, "Been down so long it looks like up to me!" beach scene
1. A drunk and depressed Harlow throws herself a beach pity-party
2. In Valley of the Dolls, Anne Welles swallows her dolls with a bit of water (not to mention lots of seaweed and sand)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I was eight years old when Harlow was released, but I remember absolutely nothing about the whole Jean Harlow mania that erupted due to Schulman's sordid biography. A huge bestseller; I remember my mother had a copy of the book around the house, but, being unfamiliar with the actress, I paid it no mind. Had I known of the book's scandalous reputation, I'd have been all over it. According to the New York Times, in 1964 all four of the major studios had Harlow films in the works. Only Joseph E Levine's "authorized" version and producer William Sargent's B&W Electronovision version were left standing when the smoke cleared.
Carol Lynley's Harlow opened three months before Levine's version and flopped at the boxoffice (and at the cost of a mere $500,000, that isn't easy to do). Levine's heavily promoted film opened to good boxoffice but scathing reviews.
For her part, Carroll Baker refused to see Harlow, only managing to catch it by mistake three years later when it was shown as the in-flight movie on a plane she was taking to Buenos Aires ("I was trapped! Actually, as I watched it, I was pleasantly surprised," Baker later wrote). Now, who can ask for a better recommendation than that?
Suffering in Mink- my favorite subgenre of film
That's Hanna Landy (Hutch's gal-pal in Rosemary's Baby) as Arthur Landau's wife, Beatrice.

BONUS MATERIAL
The rarely-seen 1965 Carol Lynley "Electronovision" version of  Harlow 
In this film, Lynley offers a very different, less flattering take on Jean Harlow (she's pretty self-possessed), it has Ginger Rogers as Mama Jean (in her last film role, and very good!). Hurd Hadfield (The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1945) is splendid as Harlow's husband Paul Bern. No production values to speak of, but in several ways, an improvement over Joseph E. Levine's version.

These early publicity shots show Baker in more period-appropriate makeup, suggesting that there was perhaps a time in the pre-production phase when authenticity was sought in the costuming and makeup. Had the film been shot in B & W (the way we see Jean Harlow in our minds), I think Carroll Baker would have looked great. But by evidence of that color photo, the period look was possibly scrapped because it was so harsh and unflattering. 

Oh, and can we take a second to talk about that other shameless pitch for a Best Song Oscar nomination - "Lonely Girl" which plays over the film's closing credits? I don't know if it's the song itself or Bobby Vinton's thin, reedy voice, but it all adds up to the musical equivalent of a cat scratching glazed pottery.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

Friday, March 16, 2012

THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT 1977

You can’t really appreciate the benefits of a film like The Other Side of Midnight until you’re confined to your bed for three days with an ass-kicker of a late-winter flu. Only when one’s energy has been sapped from inactivity, muscle weakness, and a ceaseless intake of liquids (followed, with breathtaking immediacy, by the expulsion of same from every imaginable orifice); when a toxic blend of physical inertia, mental malaise, and miserable weather renders futile all possibility of doing anything remotely productive. Only then can one fully understand what a panacea to the beleaguered spirit is the extravagantly trashy film.
"The Romance of Passion and Power"
Sidney Sheldon (the man who gave the world The Patty Duke Show & I Dream of Jeannie) wrote The Other Side of Midnight for folks who find sociopathology, brutishness, premeditated murder, and abortion-by-wire-hanger to be the stuff of epic romance.

Sometimes it takes a thing like a 100-degree-fever to break down one’s resistance enough to allow for the guilt-free enjoyment of gilt-edged sleaze like The Other Side of Midnight. A film that, at a running time of over 2 ½ hours, is an over-embellished potboiler of love, sex, and revenge so narratively antiquated, so routine and clichéd in execution, that even on first viewing it feels like a rerun. Yet it is nevertheless thoroughly engrossing and strangely reassuring in its by-the-numbers adherence to type and staunch refusal to go anywhere near the unexpected. It's all there, everything one looks for in a soap opera: sex, romance, betrayal, power plays, vengeance, retribution...the whole shebang. Directed with a daring lack of distinction by Charles Jarrot (Lost Horizon), this big-budget adaptation of the 1973 Sidney Sheldon bestseller is a comfort food movie requiring little in the way of attentiveness, and nothing more of your brain than that you leave it on the nightstand and let the glistening images and warmed-over histrionics enshroud you like an electric blanket. Lovely to look at, easy to ingest, and 100% lacking in anything remotely substantive, The Other Side of Midnight is the cinema equivalent of a sugar pill.
Marie-France Pisier as Noelle Page (short a, as in Pajama)
John Beck as Larry Douglas
Susan Sarandon as Catherine Alexander
Raf Vallone as Constantin Demeris
Clu Gulager as Bill Fraser
When Jacqueline Susann, the queen of crass, (and I wouldn't have it any other way) passed away in 1974, she left a sizable void in the supply pool of high-gloss motion picture camp-fests. The last of her novels to be adapted for the screen was Once is Not Enough (1975), a delightfully squalid take on the Electra Complex and May/December romance among the Hollywood elite. Following that, devotees of true highbrow smut had to wait till 1983 for Harold Robbins and Pia Zadora to pick up Susann's tacky torch and deliver the legendarily craptastic The Lonely Lady. Between 1975 and 1983, with the “slick sleaze” landscape populated by the likes of Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele, and Jackie Collins, the one book and film adaptation that genuinely felt like a worthy successor to the Susanne crown was The Other Side of Midnight. A film virtually forgotten today, but heavily promoted at the time and arriving at theaters with an incredible amount of promising advance buzz. A summer release primed to be Fox's big blockbuster hit, it bombed rather stupendously.
Father Knows Worst
"Noelle, war is coming...you have beauty. It is your only weapon of survival. Use it. Let the hand under your dress wear gold, and you'll be that much ahead of the game."
What's the French word for "Ick!"?

A kind of last-gasp, big-screen entry before the TV miniseries came to corner the market on this kind of globetrotting/bedhopping glamour drama; The Other Side of Midnight begins in 1939 and tells the story of Hard-Luck Noelle (Pisier). Noelle is a breathtakingly beautiful French woman (they’re always breathtakingly beautiful in these kinds of books) who, over the course of one remarkably bad year, has her father sell off her virginity to an employer; runs off to Paris and is robbed of all of her belongings within minutes of arrival; gets mistaken for a whore; and has a whirlwind, rapturous love affair with Larry, an American Army pilot (Beck) who ultimately abandons her (pregnant, unbeknownst to him) after telling her to go out and buy a wedding dress and wait for his return.
The Agony & The Ecstasy
Above: Noelle learns of love at the extremely hirsute hands (and back) of horny French couturier, Auguste Lanchon (Sorrell  Booke...yes, Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard).
Below: Noelle's fate is sealed when she falls in love with caddish RAF pilot Larry Douglas (Beck)

Taking a kind of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude about the cruel objectification she’s suffered at the hands of all these beastly males, the embittered Noelle embarks on a curious course of revenge. One which involves pimping herself out to the highest bidder in an effort to secure enough fame, money, and power to eventually stick it, but good, to her fleetfooted wartime paramour, whom she learns is alive and well (and very married) in Washington, D.C. 
It’s raunchy fun watching Noelle’s Evita-esque bed-climb to the top (wherein she plies her considerable sexual skills on an increasingly unappetizing assortment of men), but it’s only after Larry weds the lovably kooky dipsomaniac, Catherine (Sarandon), that The Other Side of Midnight really shifts into high gear and becomes the vengeance-fueled bitchfest I was hoping for. Only then does it begin to dawn that - for all its travelogue scenery, half-hearted The Best Years of Our Lives subtext (dramatizing vets struggling to adapt to civilian life), and pseudo-feminist parallels drawn by Catherine's climb up the ladder with her brains contrasted with Noelle's degrading use of her body  - The Other Side of Midnight is mostly fancy window-dressing in service of a diamond-encrusted parable on hell, fury and women scorned.
No Wire Hangers
Even fans of glossy trash have their limits, and this hard-to-watch abortion sequence was a real deal-breaker for many

In a previous post, I wrote of my weakness for films whose artistic reach exceeds their grasp. Films whose intentions are at direct odds with their execution. In the case of The Other Side of Midnight: a “love” story, if you can call it that, between two totally reprehensible people (admittedly, poor Noelle doesn’t start out that way); there exists a gross misinterpretation of the source material.

From watching the film and listening to the hilariously on-the-defensive DVD commentary, I’m given the distinct impression that the filmmakers thought they were making an epic love story with a strong, resilient heroine at its center…like Gone with the Wind. Pisier may be a headstrong brunette and Beck sports a dashing pencil mustache, but that is where all similarity ends. Believe me, the self-destructively monomaniacal Noelle Page is no Scarlett O’Hara; Larry, the oafish lout, is no Rhett; and The Other Side of Midnight is no Gone With the Wind…not unless I missed the scene where Scarlett and Ashley make plans to bump off Melanie.
Fatal Attractions
In spite of being an unrepentant jerk of a boyfriend and the worst husband since Guy Woodhouse, Larry has two women who suffer untold agonies to be with him. However, only one of these women is off her rocker.

Given how shabbily she's treated by men, I understand how admirable we are supposed to find it when Noelle decides, at last, she will no longer be anyone's victim. Everyone harbors at least one revenge fantasy (in my case, several), so it's really a lot of vicarious fun watching Noelle systematically plot and carry out her plans. But, given all she goes through to get back at Larry, her eventual "revenge" is rather toothless and a slap in the face to whatever "empowerment points" we've granted Noelle so far, because after one kiss from him (one of those romance novel "Unhand me you brute!" type of kisses, at that), she turns to mush in his arms. 
All sympathy for Noelle goes out the window when she demands that Larry kill his hapless wife, Catherine (who, at this point has been treated so abusively by Larry that the idea seems to benefit HIM more than it does Noelle).

I have a hunch Sidney Sheldon needed some Third Act action and arrived an unsympathetic about-face for Noelle which doesn't wholly support all that came before it. I would have loved to have Noelle and Catherine to eventually meet (at least then the narrative paralleling of their lives would have served a purpose) and, in discovering their mutual woes start and end with the philandering Larry, together plot a way to kill the guy. Now THAT would have been a crowd-pleaser (for me, anyway)!
Larry concocts a batty plan to do away with Catherine

Were The Other Side of Midnight a better film, I would say its moral ambiguity regarding Noelle was intentional (it can’t make up its mind if she is a villain or victim/ her quest for vengeance is sick or empowering) but I really don’t think it is. It’s just one of those overproduced Hollywood “properties” so preoccupied with advancing the plot and giving fans of the book all the glamour, romance, and drama they can muster; no one noticed that the film’s underlying themes come off as comically amoral and wrongheaded, and that the so-called heroine kind of loses her mind somewhere up the ladder of success.
Although The Other Side of Midnight takes place in Europe between 1939 and 1947, war and the events of the world fade into the background for the psychotically single-minded Noelle. Here, seen preening before an open window with a swastika in the distance, Noelle remains blithely oblivious to anyone's suffering but her own.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As Joan Collins would learn four years later with the premiere of the primetime television drama, Dynasty, the bad girls have all the fun and get the best lines. The Other Side of Midnight is no exception. If there's any fun to had in the sometimes drawn-out proceedings that make up the film's dual-story plotline, the fun is to be found in discovering to what lengths Noelle is willing to go to enact her revenge on Larry. That and witnessing her transformation from naive waif to, as one character puts it, "a first-class bitch."
Goodnight and Thank You
Social-climbing Noelle is about to throw over her current director/lover (Christian Marquand) for the bigger fish that is super-rich Greek tycoon, Constantin Demeris.

PERFORMANCES
The late Marie-France Pisier (who first came to the attention of American audiences in the 1975 French comedy, Cousin, Cousine) has the requisite beauty to play the role of a woman who relies almost completely on her desirability to achieve her aims. In this, her first American film, Marie-France is considerably better in dragon-lady mode than in the scenes requiring a conveyance of more subtle emotions. The film was intended to launch her as a major American star, but outside of a few TV mini-dramas, Pisier continued to do her best work in her native country. A true class act, whenever prodded by the press to dish about the tacky film Hollywood chose to launch her US career, Pisier would only say that the studio treated her like a queen and made her feel like a star before she even became one.
The exquisitely beautiful Marie-France Pisier passed away in 2011
Pisier is very appealing, but her performance in The Other Side of Midnight is perhaps too superficial to help the hackneyed narrative rise very far above the suds. For a truly harrowing portrait of obsessive love and a performance that strikes at the self-consuming desperation behind it all, check out actress Isabelle Adjani in Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975). 
The Other Side of Midnight is the parallel story of two women who share the same man but never meet.
Susan Sarandon (two years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show) has a relaxed, natural style that stands out in the starchy surroundings, but she suffers from an underwritten role.

Jay Leno, Larry Douglas, & Clutch Cargo
In popular entertainment, a strong or prominent chin can either signify a hero (Roger Ramjet, Dudley Do-Right), or villain (Dishonest John, Dick Dastardly).
Anyone care to venture a guess as to how many villains we have pictured here?

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
After sex and illicit romance, the major drawing card for a film such as this is the promise of exotic locales, glamorous costumes, and opulent surroundings. The Other Side of Midnight makes good use of its French and Greek locations (plus a few obvious studio sets), but perhaps at the price of narrative cohesion. The Other Side of Midnight is a film that purports to disapprove of the ways in which people debase themselves for money, but an entirely different, conflicting message is given when the camera lovingly lingers on the material things all that wealth can provide.
My personal favorite image of extravagance: the over-sized backgammon board

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I suppose it's because I wasn't around during the heyday of the "Women's Film" (the late 30s & 40s) that the glossy soaps of the '60s and '70s hold so much appeal for me. By and large, they are inferior films in most every aspect beyond the technical, but they represent to me a wholly pleasant diversion and return to an old-fashioned (if not archaic) method of filmmaking we're not likely to see again. 
As the years go by and more and more contemporary films start to take on the arid, distancing look of video games and computer screens; old-fashioned trash cinema like The Other Side of Midnight begins to look better and better. By the way, I have no idea what this film's title means. The Other Side of Midnight always reminds me of that old Johnny Carson soap opera satire, The Edge of Wetness.
Here We Go Again
Oh, and for those who care about such things - In 1990, the ever-prolific Sidney Sheldon wrote a sequel to The Other Side of Midnight titled, Memories of Midnight. In 1991 it was made into an indifferent TV miniseries starring Jane Seymour and Omar Sharif. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2012