Otto Preminger and the new freedoms: "Such Good Friends" (1971)

An entire book, or at the very least some sort of monograph, could be written about the ways that various old-school Hollywood directors (and even some not entirely old-school and/or studio-system-raised filmmakers) dealt with the license to show rather than imply that the collapse of the Production Code and the permissive culture of the '60s and '70s didn't just allow, but encouraged. Consider the very tasteful nudity of Wyler's 1965 The Collector, the deeply uncomfortable rape-and-strangulation scene in Hitchcock's 1972 Frenzy, the way Kubrick pigged out with the nudity and violence with 1971's A Clockwork Orange. And then there's Preminger. As Chris Fujiwara points out in his excellent critical biography The World And Its Double: The Life And Work Of Otto Preminger, the "vogue for nudity in American films" of the early '70s was something for which Preminger, "as a public opponent of censorship and a producer whose challenges to the Production Code helped lead to the MPAA's adoption of the ratings system [...] might have taken a little credit." It instead was, Fujiwara continues, "something from which he refrained from drawing much benefit in his films." Looking at the first few minutes of his 1971 film Such Good Friends one might conclude that Preminger was in fact rather befuddled by the access his camera could now conceivably enjoy. The movie opens with Dyan Cannon's character Julie Messinger dressing for a Manhattan literary party that just EVERYBODY will be at (Norman Mailer's name is dropped, repeatedly, by Julie's husband Richard, played by Laurence Luckinbill) and wearing this very revealing knit top (one of those things that looks like a mislabeled macrame plant holder; man, the counterculture really yielded some weird fashions, didn't it?) with a heavy-duty and entirely visible bra underneath; on being advised that the visible bra just isn't making it, she doffs the bra, and the top in this context is sufficiently revealing that Cannon's reported refusal to actually appear nude in the film (the very peculiar naked Polaroid we see of her later in the film is quite clearly a doctored photo) seems a little beside the point.

In any event, she leaves her building to catch a cab, and the reaction of her doorman (one Oscar Grossman) to her virtual deshabille inspires a sight gag that would seem more at home in a Three Stooges short than in any Preminger film (with, of course, the ever-possible-exception of Skidoo). 

One can almost hear the perhaps-stifling-a-"boner" "BOING!" sound effect, although, blessedly, it does not in fact materialize on the soundtrack.

And Julie is at first confused...

...and then affronted. Life is confusing in this ever-changing world in which we're living, that's for sure. 

Such Good Friends is a strange duck to be sure; as Dave Kehr pointed out in his excellent Times piece on the recent DVDs of it and Preminger's prior Hurry Sundown, both recent DVD releases on the invaluable Olive label. Dave calls it a a picture that "seems in active opposition to its cultural moment" in the review proper, and "a provocatively unpleasant comedy" on his own website, where there's a good comments thread (as usual) on the topic. Both assessments strike me as about right. Many synopses of the film describe it as a story of a woman who, upon discovering that her unexpectedly comatose husband has been serially and relentlessly and elaborately cheating on her, embarks on a series of affairs. That's not quite right. Julie doesn't make this discovery into about an hour into this hour-and-forty-minute film, and once she does, what she embarks on aren't so much affairs as they are mutually humiliating sexual encounters. The hour leading up to her discovery largely concerns itself with a relentless and merciless examination of the New York media world of its time. Fujiwara makes an indirect link in his book between the subject matter here and the fact that Preminger himself was one of the "characters" in Tom Wolfe's famed account of that Black Panther fundraising party at Leonard Bernstein's place, in Wolfe's reportorial essay "Radical Chic." Julie's husband is a magazine art director who's just published a book, and the world they share—one from which their two little boys seem entirely estranged from—is cramped and snotty and oppressive, for all its bourgeois comforts. And the film's first hour takes its own sweet time dissecting that world, albeit in a desultory way that sometimes reveals flashes of mise-en-scene brilliance from Preminger and only occasional glimpses of the scalpel-like wit of Elaine May, who was the pseudonymously credited writer (adapting Lois Gould's novel), the last in a long line of scribes on this project. The picture is rather preoccupied, early on, with Julie's own insecurities, both sexual and emotional, and the viewer is made privy to her bizarre fantasies, including a ravishing by a hunky, glass-smashing cabbie. Most bizarre is the instance of nudity Fujiwara cites as Preminger's "ironic reaction" to the prior-noted vogue for nudity. At the all-important party where Norman Mailer is supposed to turn up, Julie and her husband instead meet the aged and  slightly truculent egomaniacal novelist Bernard Kalman, whose new book is entitled Weissman. And for some reason Julie is compelled to imagine Kalman naked. Was it ever said that the late, great Burgess Meredith was ever anything less than game? If so, below you shall find your possible not-safe-for-work refutation of that notion.

"Unclothing Meredith is Preminger's way of making fun of the audience for expecting nudity; it also relieve the erotic pressure of the film, letting it be about something besides eroticism," says Fujiwara. Indeed. Also, aiiee.

Dave Kehr's piece discusses the picture's acute visual depiction of the claustrophobia of urban/family life, and I think there are certain shot/compositions in the film conveying this that are as great as anything in Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, ever my benchmark for imagery-of-domestic-suffocation. As here:

And here:

And let the heterosexual males in the audience pause at their leisure for a serene contemplation of Jennifer O'Neill's divine midsection. Ahem. The other individuals in the shot are, from left, James Coco, Ken Howard, Cannon and Luckinbill. 

Also of interest are a couple of cameos, one from theater director and impresario Joseph Papp, playing his own self...

...and another from then B-leading-man-sunken-into-obscurity Lawrence Tierney, playing a hospital guard. I imagine that at the time he was inclined to take his day rate directly down to Terminal Bar, where he was among the more renowned regulars, poor sod. 

The image quality on the Olive DVD of Such Good Friends is acceptable, nothing to write home about though, but I for one am just glad to be able to see it at all after so many years. It's a fascinating picture; hardly the utter disaster some might have you believe it is but rather a picture whose flaws are very nearly as compelling and curious as its triumphs. 

Comments

[Andy]

I seem to remember Preminger punishing us in Skidoo with his new ability to show whatever he liked--via Carol Channing's see-through bra. Did I imagine that? More horrifying to think that I did.

[bill]

Oh, if only Hitchcock had been able to make KALEIDOSCOPE...

[Tom Block]

I wish some of the old-school guys, like Wellman, Hawks and Minnelli, had been able to put nudity in at least a couple of their pictures just to see how they would've handled it, but there are some others who it would've been a downright boon for--Ray, Lang, Walsh, Joe Lewis, even Ophuls. I watched "While the City Sleeps" in the middle of the night last night, and as it was Lang did everything but shove the camera up Rhonda Fleming's skirt.

[christian]

Dyan Cannon despised Preminger and they barely communicated through filming. Shocker!

[jbryant]

Does Burgess Meredith's razor wrangler get a credit? And how flattering that it took more than a Penguin Pocket edition to protect his modesty, such as it was.

I've wanted to see this ever since Rex Reed named it worst of its year. While not a guarantee of quality, it often meant there was more to a film than met Rex's eye.

[Victor Morton]

Tom:

Who cares? What do you think about getting a gay Jewish doctor to commit euthanasia on Jean-Luc Godard??

Seriously ... aren't moments like what you cite in WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS the classic argument AGAINST screen nudity? That the old-school directors were able to convey lust or eros without it. Frankly I think that Lang's fetishizing of Fleming would have been far too much if he could show her nude; in other words, nudity would have required him to dial back his erotic direction of her.

As for Ophuls, I could see LOLA MONTES, parts of LA RONDE and the third section of LE PLAISIR profiting from some nudity. CAUGHT, MADAME DE, other parts of LA RONDE, and the first two-thirds of LE PLAISIR -- absolutely no way. It'd have been like dropping bricks in a goldfish bowl.

[Tom Block]

Who's Godard? He sounds like a wanker.

>aren't moments like what you cite in WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS the classic argument AGAINST screen nudity? That the old-school directors were able to convey lust or eros without it.

That indeed is the classic argument, and people always seem eager to sign off on it. I'm in awe of their resourcefulness and would never think the canon could be improved by nuditizing the old pix, but neither am I convinced that they didn't suffer from not having at least *the ability* to get more graphic. (Which is different than simply *being* more graphic.) It's like telling a painter the only blues he can use are very pale ones; sure, you can do a lot with pale blue, but sometimes what's called for is BLUE. And I meant it when I said I'd like to see what the old guys would do with it--I get the feeling we'd have more variety in our current sex and nude scenes, such of them as there are. (There was a shot in "Blue Valentine" that made me sit up a bit just because it wasn't an angle I'd seen a thousand times before.) It's hard not to think more freedom wouldn't have opened up a whole new world of content for guys like Ray and Mann while cancelling out those squirrelly compromises, e.g., the ridiculous "no whorehouse" edict for "Kane". That one in particular has always stung.

[lazarus]

Glenn, I hope you're going to give Hurry Sundown its own write-up. I know it's not supposed to be some lost masterpiece either, but it always looked to me as the more interesting of these two films, especially on a visual level. Plus, what a cast (even though the thought of Michael Caine playing a Southerner scares me).

[Kent Jones]

Lazarus, It's ot entirely clear to me whether or not you've seen HURRY SUNDOWN, but I don't think it's interesting visually or on any other level. I'm sure that it will have stiff competition if I ever get around to seeing ROSEBUD, but it lingers in my memory as the very worst of Preminger's films.

[skelly]

I'd certainly agree with Kent Jones - saw HURRY SUNDOWN for the first time just a few days back and it's the worst of the Premingers I've seen (think I've seen 27 - but not ROSEBUD, sounds like I shouldn't rush out).

jbryant - as you probably know REX REED had a bit part in HURRY SUNDOWN - so he probably had it in for Preminger (not that his view on SUCH GOOD FRIENDS would matter much one way or the other).

Completely agree with our host; SUCH GOOD FRIENDS is truly fascinating.

[D Cairns]

Rosebud sees Otto-eroticism of a far more conventional sort, with nude Kim Cattrall, Isabelle Huppert, etc. There may be some kind of mise-en-scene interest, but you'd have to furiously ignore everything else to appreciate that.

Thanks for the nude Burgess!

[jbryant]

skelly: Actually, I had forgotten Reed was in HURRY SUNDOWN (my one viewing of the film was on TV when I was a kid; tried to watch on Netflix Instant Watch a while back, but the pan-and-scan was a deal breaker).

I did, however, name my old band Hurry Sundown. Good thing we never went pro; turns out there's a Missouri band of the same name that tours and records (though they got the name from a song by The Outlaws, not the movie).

[Partisan]

Ah, nudity in film. Obviously the desire for PG-13 ratings, and the idea you can't have nudity in PG-13 films is one reason. But as long as film directing, or at least film directors that sites like this one pay any attention to, is the most male dominated profession outside most religious hierarchies, I can't say its rarity is that much of a problem.

[Fabian W.]

I sometimes wonder what "Forty Guns" would feel like with nudity.

Now that this isn't totally off-topic (though I still apologize) - "Park Row" seems to be finally available on DVD, from MGM's Archive On-Demand Service. Can anyone comment on this, Image quality and the like? And I'd always heard that Criterion was working on this. Is that totally out the window now?

[Kent Jones]

jbryant, isn't "Hurry Sundown" an old blues song? (I don't mean the Hawkwind song, "Hurry On Sundown.") There's a man in WILD RIVER singing it in the distance as Montogomery Clift and Lee Remick enter the old house.

The sax job exchange between Jane Fonda and Michael Caine in HURRY SUNDOWN is, if memory serves, the absolute low point of the movie.

[haice]

I remember as a kid in the late sixties gathering around the TV like other middle-American families to watch such films as HURRY SUNDOWN on ABC'S Sunday Night a the Movies or SECRET CEREMONY on NBC'S Saturday Night at the Movies.
Very strange.

[Brian Dauth]

Mankiewicz had female nudity in THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN . . . but cut the shot (he also toned down the violence which had the effect of making it more chilling).

As for ROSEBUD: I saw it a few years back at MOMA, and while no masterpiece, it was better than I had expected or been led to believe.

[jbryant]

Kent: Madlyn Davis had a song called "Hurry Sundown Blues" in the '20s; that might be it. There's an Earl Robinson and Yip Harburg song titled "Hurry Sundown," but I think it was written for Preminger's film. If so, it obviously couldn't be the one in WILD RIVER.

Re the Caine/Fonda "saxual" encounter: It's probably a good thing my band's sax player hadn't seen the film.

As for nudity in classic films: if Mankiewicz had been able to shoot Linda Darnell in the buff in A LETTER TO THREE WIVES or NO WAY OUT, I probably wouldn't have gotten out of puberty alive.

[wholesale jerseys]

I wish some of the old-school guys, like Wellman, Hawks and Minnelli, had been able to put nudity in at least a couple of their pictures just to see how they would've handled it, but there are some others who it would've been a downright boon for--Ray, Lang, Walsh, Joe Lewis, even Ophuls.

[Johan Andreasson]

The song in ”Wild River” must be ”Hurry Sundown (See What Tomorrow Brings) by Richard Huey and Clarence Williams. Huey’s recording of it is on the album ”Jazzin’ The Blues Vol. 4”.

[I.B.]

@ Fabian W.: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/dvd_reviews54/park_row.htm

[Tom Block]

>Mankiewicz had female nudity in THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN . . . but cut the shot

He should've kept going.

[Brian Dauth]

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN... was cut too much I think. There is a raggedness to the continuity that affects the final reels. But even mutilated, his genius shows through. I always thought LONESOME COWBOYS and TWACM... would make a lovely double bill of Westerns from a queer perspective.

[Cadavra]

CROOKED MAN is definitely one of Mank's most underrated films. I sometimes show it to people, who end up surprised at how much they like it...though there was one clod who complained mid-way that he couldn't enjoy it because he couldn't tell what was coming next. It never occurred to him that this might be considered an asset by most people.