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WHEN REALLY BAD AIN’T FUNNY How did Peter Finch, who wore silver hair better than just about any other actor, get hoodwinked into Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare? You hope he did it strictly for the money; what Kim Novak’s excuse was, well, perhaps she had to pay past due bills for all the Purina horse chow delivered to her ranch. (Reportedly she smarted over the box office flop of what she thought was her best work, the remake Of Human Bondage, and her choices thereafter did suggest venomous contempt.) As writers Ed Margulies and Steve Rebello cheerfully point out, bad movies we love are usually of such tastelessness, both intended and unintended, they are rank as guilty pleasures. According to the guys, Lylah Clare is “a laugh-till-you-ache classic.” I’d say even if you were stoned on Maui Wowie you’d still find it difficult to feel the ease or willingness to laugh. Permeating throughout is a moldly scuzziness dampening the giggles. Primary about Aldrich is his dirty old man fantasies about lesbian sex—noticed most humorously in his Sodom and Gomorrah when Anookie Aimée enjoys not bothering to hide in the throne room closet her preferences. He proved his fixation can also bore an audience to death while waiting for the salacious, as in 1968’s The Killing of Sister George, in which it takes some two hours to finally get beyond Beryl Reid’s butchess braying to get to Coral Browne giving Susannah York a finger job and sucking on her nipples. (The scene does have a degree of heat, and you wonder just how much Browne enjoyed it.) In Lylah Clare, Aldrich dabbles with transvestitism as well as lez hankerings on what may be the most cornball level in any mainstream American movie during the 60s. But its incompetence on every level negates worthiness as a screamer. Nothing about this movie or Sister George couldn’t or shouldn’t be camp; they’re directed without the slightest recognition the material is fit for send up. The real dykes in the bar scenes of Sister George, for example, presage without the malicious bite Camille Paglia’s disdain for the apparent universality of immature Navratilovas and k.d. langs as “baby-faced desexed Wayne Newtons” pressed together listening to “defanged disco, with the monotonous tick-tock beat ideal for bad dancers.” Evidence on screen supports Novak may have resorted to her own slacky notion of camp, as a last ditch effort to save herself—she has scenes only the late Divine would dare and do much better. The wasted sleaze is played offensively straight as in “I can holler louder than you” instead of obscenely funny; Browne, for example, shows up doing a limped Rona Barrett without a payoff and Valentina Cortese plays something called Countess Bozo Bedoni. The gauche material screams for the John Waters treatment. Aldrich would ask the fatal question: “Is Kim Novak a joke in her own time?”
Text COPYRIGHT © 2002 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
