Ray Liotta Does Horrible Things With a Garden Hose in His Riveting Debut Performance in the 1983 Camp Classic The Lonely Lady
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In a perfect world, Ray Liotta would have made one of the all-time great debut film performances as a charismatic psychopath who terrorizes his ex-wife and her new boyfriend in Jonathan Demme’s 1986 dark comedy/psychodrama Something Wild.
In this imperfect world Liotta made his first film a few years earlier with 1983’s notorious The Lonely Lady. Liotta played another sexy sociopath in an attention-grabbing performance but quality-wise a vast universe separated the actor’s first film from his second.
If Something Wild and later Goodfellas represented the dizzying heights to which Liotta could ascend, The Lonely Lady was marvelously representative of the fascinatingly scuzzy lows littering the late actor’s gloriously checkered resume.
The Lonely Lady is no mere bad movie. It’s no garden variety stinker but rather a flop of historic proportions. It bombed at the box-office, was nominated for six Golden Raspberries and placed the final nail in the coffin of star Pia Zadora’s film career a mere two year after her Golden Globes-nominated performance in Butterfly.
Trash paperback titan Harold Robbins, who wrote the novel that inspired The Lonely Lady loosely based on the life and legend of colleague Jacqueline Susann derided the movie, as did star Pia Zadora.
Ah yes, the world’s BEST storyteller
Realizing what a fiasco it had on its hands, the studio hired Golden Raspberry founder John Wilson to conceive a press campaign for The Lonely Lady that leaned into its surreal, almost inconceivable awfulness.
The Lonely Lady occupies a place of prominence in the great pantheon of legendary disasters that are so bad that they’re good. It’s an unintentional laugh riot filled with iconic scenes, none more infamous than a sexual assault involving the luckless heroine and a garden hose.
Liotta isn’t onscreen for long but he makes an indelible impression all the same, in no small part because his pot-smoking, sex-crazed degenerate is the one wielding the garden utensil.
For the first but certainly not the last time Liotta delivered a legitimately great performance in an ostentatiously awful motion picture, an absolute boondoggle that angrily demands to be laughed at and viciously mocked.
The titular solitary lass’ violation with a garden hose is supposed to be an unintentional gut-buster but Liotta makes it terrifying. The movie itself may be pure melodramatic hokum but Liotta makes his five minutes or so onscreen horrifyingly authentic.
The film’s myriad marvelous miscalculations begin with the laughable decision to open the film with the then twenty-eight year old Zadora playing plucky protagonist Jerilee Randall as a high school student accepting a Creative Writing award that, as Liotta’s character observes, looks uncannily like a giant dildo roughly half the size of the woman who won it.
The girlish, diminutive Zadora looked WAY older than eighteen so the filmmakers put her hair in pig-tails and outfitted her in overalls. They stopped just short of having her carry around a giant lollipop and a rag doll to further highlight her youth.
handsome man!
The talented young writer then goes to a party after which she and her boyfriend get into a car with Joe Heron (Ray Liotta) and his sexually adventurous girlfriend.
Even in hideous 1980s fashion, Liotta is dangerously sexy. He has the sinister vibe of a dreamboat who might strangle you in a fit of rage, a hunk with a screw loose and no sense of boundaries or morals.
Joe makes Jerilee very uncomfortable by openly fucking his girlfriend in the backseat, receiving oral sex and trying to get a foursome going with the couple in the front seat.
Just when it seems like things cannot get any worse or more dangerous the quartet makes the mistake of going to the home of the hotshot screenwriter dad of Jerilee’s boyfriend. It is there that the infamous assault occurs.
It’s supposed to be funny. Instead it’s horrifying because it is a sexual assault and sexual assault is not funny regardless of whether or not a garden hose is involved but also because Ray Liotta fully commits to making the violence and aggression as genuine and intense as possible.
And then Liotta is gone and the movie is never anywhere near as raw or intense or disturbingly visceral again. It’s not a big role in terms of screen time but its impact is huge.
Joe is the first and most savage of a series of men who rob Jerilee of her humanity by reducing her to a sex doll to be used and then angrily thrown away.
When Jerilee tells older, more powerful men about her creative ideas and ambitions, their response is invariably, “Yeah, that sounds great. Let’s go to my bedroom and have sex.”
The first man to give Jerilee that treatment is Walter Thornton (Lloyd Bochner), an established, much older screenwriter who falls for her body and her mind but mostly her body.
Walter and everyone else in the film treats Jerilee like they can’t believe she knows how to read, let alone write but that does not keep her from cranking out a critically-acclaimed best seller.
Being a silly girl, Jerilee can’t even understand the glowing raves for her book but she’s able to leverage her status as a best-selling author into a poorly paid gig typing rewrites for her husband.
But when the BEST SELLING AUTHOR adds a single word to hubby’s script (“Why???!?!!!?!?!?” specifically) it tears their relationship apart.
In a rage, the angry and insecure older man asks his soon to be ex-wife if she gets her kicks from having sexual relation with garden hoses. The fool doesn’t realize that she was horribly assaulted and labors under the delusion that she goes to the local gardening store to get her sick thrills.
A series of sordid flings, each more soul-crushing and nakedly transactional than the last, follow, as Jerilee discovers that Hollywood is the cesspool of depravity everyone always says it is and endures sexism at its most cartoonishly over the top.
this, friend, is what a writer looks like.
Here Hollywood is the kind of town where dudes making no effort to hide the fact that they’re ogling your pert young breasts say things like, “with a figure like yours who needs to think!” and “They don’t believe a dumb blonde (like Jerilee) can write a movie!”
It’s enough to drive a gal mad. The madness of the movie business drives our heroine so insane that she performatively showers fully clothed and has an extended psychedelic freakout in which she imagines that the faces of the men who have brutalized her are appearing on the keys of her beloved typewriter before breaking apart.
The Lonely Lady is supposed be the story of a tough young woman who finds the inner strength to not only survive but thrive in a business that destroys people like her. Instead it’s the story of a soft and vulnerable little girl who somehow manage to succeed in the violently misogynistic world of show-business largely out of blind luck.
The film ends with what it imagines is its big moment, when Jerilee channels her inner Howard Beale and condemns Hollywood for being an insatiable monster of depravity while picking up an award for Best Original Screenplay at an Oscars-like ceremony. This is met by hoots of disapproval from industry scum who don’t take kindly to someone impugning the good name and unimpeachable integrity of the movie business.
The Lonely Lady angrily insists that the titular company-hungry femme is a natural writer of explosive natural ability, a real Lady Shakespeare, yet Zadora zadorably seems incapable of writing anything more lengthy or ambitious than a grocery list. She’s a pokey little goldfish in a tank of piranhas, a lost little girl in a world of wolfish men.
The Lonely Lady lives up to its reputation as the best of the worst, a true good-bad abomination that you absolutely must see if you love movies that are terrible because they’re terrible for reasons that go above and beyond boasting the unforgettable film debut of a true legend of the silver screen.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
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