Shards from the Fractured Mirror: Goodbye, Norma Jean, Hollywood Man, I'll Do Anything, Myra Breckinridge, Susan Slept Here and White Hunter, Black Heart

For the last ten months or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page. 

I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 240 movies so far and will cover 365 in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about. 

In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible. 

Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976)

Misty Rowe went from being eye candy on hayseed hit Hee Haw to starring in a feature film as Marilyn Monroe, one of our greatest pop icons. That should be a big step up in terms of role and medium but it’s a lateral move at best considering the deplorable nature of 1976’s Goodbye, Norma Jean, which professes to be history and biography when it’s really just inept, joyless soft-core pornography.

A Z-grade period film that makes the Hollywood of the 1940s look and feel uncannily like the porn world of the 1970s, Goodbye, Norma Jean follows Rowe’s tragic heroine as she attempts to make the big leap from cheesecake photo shoots and stag films to Hollywood stardom.

Along the way the buxom blonde with the aura of ineffable sadness endures a cartoonish gauntlet of abuse, exploitation and sexual assault at the hands of an endless series of leering, wolfish men with grabby hands and dirty minds and at least one evil lesbian. Goodbye, Norma Jean is every bit as intent on exploiting Monroe as its monstrous, one-dimensional predators. It’s an ugly, cheap, nasty piece of work that reduces the wildly misunderstood actress to her sexuality and her brokenness. This bottom-feeding trash is less an exploration of the cruelty and exploitation its subject received at the hands of show-business and the film industry than a callous extension of it.

Hollywood Man (1976) FM

Child actor, bodybuilder, championship arm wrestler, interpreter, veteran, poet, stuntman, professional tough guy and all-around renaissance man William Smith co-wrote and produced the macho 1976 b-movie Hollywood Man in addition to starring as  Rafe Stoker, a veteran filmmaker in trouble.

The cash-strapped actor-director with the weakness for distractingly phony fake mustaches needs money to finish his latest biker movie. So he unwisely seeks out an avaricious money-man out to get the highest possible return on his investment through illegal means.

The unethical film financiers choose to sabotage the production of Rafe’s movie so that they can take everything that he has put up as collateral if he fails to follow through on his contract and complete his film.

To that end, they hire Harvey (Ray Girardin), a deranged biker gang leader with a history in film that may exist only in his vivid imagination and his thugs to ensure that the actor-director with the physique of a Greek god doesn’t succeed in making it past the finish line.

Director Jack Starrett, a veteran of biker movies, blaxploitation cheapies and at least one film with a screenplay co-written by Terence Malick (1974’s The Gravy Train), gives the sleazy proceedings the primal gut-punch of pure pulp. Smith is an intimidating and an impressive presence, a mountain of a man with fists of concrete but he’s upstaged throughout by the bad guys, an unforgettable aggregation of degenerates and sex criminals who behave with a brutality that’s shocking even in gritty, grimy grind-house fare like this.

Hollywood Man is lean, defiantly unsentimental and boldly committed to its bleakly fatalistic view of the b-movie-making world as a hellish realm of greed and arrogance capable of destroying even strong men like its two-fisted protagonist.

Starrett’s overachieving drive in Moviesploitation quickie is a different kind of movie about the film industry. It’s tougher and more violent than the usual fodder but it shares with a surprising number of films about the industry an uncompromisingly grim conception of movie-world competition as not just tough but deadly.

I’ll Do Anything (1994)

I’ll Do Anything James L. Brooks’ hopelessly muddled 1994 show-business comedy-drama about the soul and art-crushing inhumanity of focus group testing and the evils of creative cowardice and compromise, infamously began life as a musical with music by Prince and choreography by Twyla Tharp.

Then, in a wonderfully ironic development, the musical version of I’ll Do Anything bombed with focus groups so, in a blatant act of creative cowardice and compromise, Brooks tried to salvage what he had by destroying everything that made it unique and audacious and took a pair of garden shears to all of the musical numbers but one.

It didn’t work. When I’ll Do Anything hobbled onto screens, a wounded beast with nuclear-grade bad buzz, it earned mixed reviews and bombed at the box-office.

It’s easy to see why. A fiasco of galloping phoniness and rank artificiality, I’ll Do Anything aspires to the iconic, crowd-pleasing flashiness of the “Show me the money” scene from Jerry Maguire about forty percent of the time and succeeds only in embarrassing itself.

An overwhelmed Nick Nolte stars as Matt Hobbs, a grizzled hunk of an actor whose once promising career has petered out. His life changes forever when his classist nightmare of an ex-wife Beth (Tracy Ullman) shows up just long enough to drop off six year old daughter Jeannie (Whittni Wright) for a stay of indefinite length while she does hard time.

The passionate man-child with the voice of gravel and his gratingly precocious offspring grow up together as Jeannie follows her struggling pops into acting while he dallies with Cathy Breslow (Joely Fisher). Matt's new love is a script-reader for Joel Silver-like producer Burke Adler (Albert Brooks) who is pursuing a dream project remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town along with a sexual fling with the older actor.

Brooks is a hurricane of hilarity as a proud vulgarian who learns the hard way that he can’t control life and romance the way he can the production of hyper-violent action movies. Unfortunately James L. Brooks foolishly sidelines Albert Brooks for much of the film so he can focus on Nolte’s relationship with his daughter and a Matt and Cathy relationship that strikes an endless series of false notes. I’ll Do Anything is blessed and cursed with an earnestness and sincerity, not to mention a breathless bigness and desperate eagerness to impress, that’s alternately admirable and embarrassing. For a movie that wants deeply to be loved I’ll Do Anything is perversely committed to being unlikable.

Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Gore Vidal’s controversial 1968 best-seller Myra Breckinridge is the kind of broad, self-consciously naughty social satire that scandalizes and titillates on the page but dies a hideous death in the more literal and unforgiving world of film. In keeping with the foolishly fearless spirit of the time Fox inexplicably gave British bad boy multi-hyphenate Michael Sarne complete creative control over the project despite the filmmaker being a moonlighting pop star and actor with only a single modest feature film directorial credit to his name.

If nothing else, Sarne had a bold vision for Myra Breckinridge rooted in the cheeky juxtaposition of Old Hollywood innuendo and New Hollywood transgression. The filmmakers use classic movie clips of stars like Laurel & Hardy to comment on the action as comic punctuation and brought back Mae West after a prolonged absence from film as Leticia Van Allen, a lusty and insatiable performer turned agent who makes a point of sleeping with all of the studs she represents.

In a shockingly effective, poignant performance, film critic Rex Reed plays Myron Breckinridge, a sad movie lover who goes under the knife and wakes up Amazonian beauty Myra Breckridge (Raquel Welch). Myra makes a sacred pilgrimage to the holy Mecca of Hollywood pretending to be Myron’s widow in order to claim her rightful inheritance, half of an acting school run by Myron’s uncle Buck Loner, an oafish cowboy star played by John Huston in a performance that’s embarrassing for the right and wrong reasons.

Myra becomes fixated on Rusty Godowski (Roger Herren) and Mary Ann (Farrah Fawcett), a couple at the acting school who embody an impossible ideal of freshly scrubbed heterosexual innocence she wants to subvert and destroy. They’re human Barbie and Ken dolls and easy prey for a sexual predator like Myra.

Part pop art, part Felliniesque spectacle and part leering soft-core pornography, Myra Breckinridge is a supremely ugly, mean-spirited movie about beautiful people that’s audacious, original and daring but also never even remotely funny.

Susan Slept Here (1954) FM

The sour-faced scolds at the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned Susan Slept Here, Frank Tashlin’s 1954 adaptation of Steve Fisher and Alex Gottlieb’s play Susan, on moral grounds. But you don’t have to be a Catholic to find something deeply problematic and troubling about the premise of Tashlin’s ribald Yuletide crowd-pleaser. The film’s premise feels like it was conceived by a less perverted version of Lolita villain Humbert Humbert, one willing to wait until a particularly beguiling nymphet is ALMOST old enough to be of age before depicting her as an aggressive, love-struck beauty romantically obsessed with a grown male writer.

In Susan Slept Here, fresh-faced charmer Debbie Reynolds plays the titular underage beauty, Susan Landis. She’s the world’s most wholesome, All-American juvenile delinquent, a seventeen year old who ends up being more or less given to Academy Award-winning thirty-five year old bachelor screenwriter Mark Christopher (Dick Powell, in his final film and only color movie) by a pair of Vice Squad cops as a Christmas gift.

Soft-hearted Vice Squad Sergeant Sam Hanlon (Herb Vigran) doesn’t want the likable teen to spend Christmas in confinement and he knows that the writer’s block-plagued wordsmith is looking to write a screenplay about troubled youths. So he goes to the unusual extreme of more or less gift-wrapping and hand-delivering the feisty young woman to the writer of distinction.

It’s established repeatedly that Susan is a vulnerable underage girl but that somehow does not keep her from sharing a lusty smooch with a man in his mid-thirties played by a forty-nine year old screen veteran and then marrying him for pragmatic reasons. Reynolds is a gifted comedienne whose romantic fixation with her unlikely benefactor strikes an unexpected note of apple-cheeked innocence and the perfectly chosen cast has a ball with the screenplay’s never-ending parade of wicked one-liners.

Susan Slept Here found one of cinema’s true auteurs and greatest satirists in peak form spoofing subjects near and dear to his heart: Hollywood, movies, the glorious vulgarity of pop culture and American life and the war of the sexes. Considering the borderline unforgivable nature of the film’s premise, it should not work at all.

The protagonist should come off as a creep and a predator and the film should feel leering and offensive but Tashlin and his gifted collaborators pull off a minor miracle in making this material not only palatable but tons of fun.

White Hunter Black Heart (1990) FM

Clint Eastwood isn’t the type of actor who disappears inside roles. Instead, roles have a way of becoming eclipsed by the vastness of his persona. Much of the fascination of Eastwood’s towering performance in 1990’s White Hunter Black Heart, consequently, comes from the way Eastwood channels John Huston’s essence, mannerisms and cadences while still remaining irrevocably himself. John Wilson, the swaggering, two-fisted, wildly charismatic hero and anti-hero of Eastwood’s assured 1990 adaptation of Peter Viertel’s 1953 novel about the making of African Queen is a mesmerizing mutation, half John Huston, half Clint Eastwood and all man.

The renegade writer-director with the endless line of snappy patter is interested in traveling to Africa to film a fictionalized version of The African Queen primarily as an excuse to achieve his life’s dream of hunting and killing a majestic elephant alongside Pete Verrill (Jeff Fahey), a screenwriter working on the script whose role as Wilson’s friend, sidekick and sounding board is more important than his contributions to the screenplay.

The iron-willed wordsmith’s obsession with proving himself in the ultimate manly art of slaughtering the beautiful and sacred in service of his monstrous ego quickly renders the expensive location film shoot a half-hearted afterthought. John Wilson doesn’t care who he hurts in his single-minded pursuit of shooting the big game that is his true raison d’être rather than shooting the film.

John Wilson is a role as unusual as it is inspired. The Academy-Award winning filmmaker is generally a man of few words but Huston was a legendary talker, a raconteur and bon vivant who loved to hold court and tell stories and dazzle with his intellect. Eastwood is gloriously, uncharacteristically verbose here. He takes pleasure in monologuing and wisecracking the same way he usually enjoys silence.

Jeff Fahey’s hunky scribe is overshadowed at every turn by the booming theatrical bigness of Eastwood’s performance but the larger than life lead is supposed to tower over his costars the way Huston did even the movie stars and hotshot writers of The African Queen. It’s rare and wonderful to see Eastwood have so much fun and be so fun and funny. White Hunter Black Heart is a rousing and resonant tribute from one larger than life actor-auteur to another.

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