The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Billed as “The Romance of Passion and Power,” The Other Side of Midnight is one of the most stunningly asinine movies ever made — and widely known to be one of Andy Warhol’s favorites. It was also intended to be one of Fox’s biggest 1977 releases, with high hopes for a major run at that season’s Academy Awards. As a matter of fact, legend holds that Fox executives considered the film to be such a sure thing that studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. drew on the block-booking tradition of the previous era in order to force theaters to accept Midnight as a package deal with one of the studio’s B products — in this case a science fiction picture from a new director named George Lucas. While it is certain that, at least in this instance, theater owners ended up with nothing to grumble about, Midnight failed at the ticket booth and turned out to be a train wreck for everyone involved, except for costumer Irene Sharaff, who managed the film’s lone Oscar nomination — though the nod owes more to Sharaff’s reputation as a five time winner than it does her work in this film. Marie-France Pisier is a wonderful mannequin, but the costumes aren’t that good.

The sprawling three-hour adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s trashy novel concerns a French girl named Noelle (Pisier) who flees her Marseilles home for Paris in the years just prior to the second world war. Just as it appears she’ll be devoured by the shadier aspects of the city of lights, Noelle is rescued by Larry Douglas (John Beck), an American RAF captain, who seduces her with dinner and the promise of a place to sleep. They couple enjoys a short-lived fairy tale romance, that ends abruptly when Larry is called back to the U.S. in order to train fighter pilots, leaving Noelle — now secretly pregnant (!) — jilted and alone. In a rather shocking bathtub abortion scene, jarringly out of character with the rest of the film, Noelle terminates how own pregnancy and vows to start a new life as a (wait for it!) … film star! Over the course of the next eight years, her career flourishes and eventually she becomes the trophy of a Greek shipping tycoon, who happens to be the world’s richest man. Meanwhile, Larry romances and weds Cathy (Susan Sarandon), a fresh-faced girl Friday to the chief of a Washington DC public relations firm. Unable to hold down a job as a commercial pilot in the years after the war, Larry bounces from job to job and his marriage slowly crumbles — that is until he’s hired to pilot the private plane of a certain Greek shipping tycoon. Old flames flare once again, and in true Postman Always Rings Twice fashion, plans of murder follow — though in this case the target isn’t the Greek, but the shrewish American wife. The film tries hard to take itself seriously, but the ending is so delightfully contrived and over the top — some might say bad, others, hilarious — that it almost makes the whole affair worth watching.

This is an awful film, in all of its late 70s Sheldon glory. It’s poorly executed, especially considering the narrative continuity and film editing. The story moves through time, but does little to help the viewer situate the story in a time or place, using only spoken dialog to do so. It fails to capture the flavor of the war years — barely addressing them at all — making only a half-hearted effort to authentically portray the French capital, expecting viewers to be held rapt by the movie’s melodrama. Even Leonard Maltin, that faithful friend of classic film, rates this as a bomb. Yet it somehow manages to maintain a shaky hold on your attention, though I’m certain that in the case of most male viewers, myself included, it’s the film’s abundant nudity that does the trick. Pisier is certainly beautiful, and Charles Jarrott (the same director responsible for previous big Oscar contenders Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots) gets her out of her clothing as often as possible. The requisite shot of a topless Susan Sarandon is to be found as well, but Pisier is clearly the film’s leading actress. The casting of John Beck is one of Midnight’s biggest flaws. Essentially a TV actor, and one of little note, Beck has neither the looks nor the chops to make good here. The film lives or dies on his ability to have believable, even if not smoldering, chemistry with both women, yet Beck just doesn’t deliver. His performance is awkward, clumsy, and shows that the actor was well out of his depth. Frankly, given Beck’s resume, one wonders how he got such a big part in such an important picture.

If this weren’t so unbelieveably long, I’d happily recommend it as a piece of fun camp along the same lines as Meyer’s Valley of the Dolls or even Jacqueline Suzanne’s Once is Not Enough, but in the case of The Other Side of Midnight once is plenty.

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Grade: F

Directed by Charles Jarrott

Starring Marie-France Pisier, Susan Sarandon, and John Beck

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 165 minutes

Availability: DVD, Netflix

Joe (1970)

Here’s a film that careens wildly from one theme to the next, and can’t seem to make up its mind exactly what it wants to be, or to whom. Joe is about young junkies in love, the estrangement between generations in the late sixties, the tension between blue- and white-collar workers, the alienation of an unhappy urban existence, and the perils of vigilantism. Each theme is worth its own movie, yet Joe tries to deliver on all of them.

The story revolves around the relationship between a wealthy Manhattan father (Dennis Patrick) who accidentally murders his junky daughter’s (Susan Sarandon, in her film debut.) drug-pushing boyfriend and the man to whom he accidentally admits his crime. In the wake of the murder, adman Bill Compton wanders into a bar where he finds Joe Curran (Peter Boyle) at the next stool. Joe is one of those working-stiffs who thinks the world owes him a little something extra for his forty hours a week, and hippies, liberals and minorities are taking the country to hell in a hand basket. He pines for the good old days and rails blindly against everything from his own kids to those on welfare. Conventional wisdom suggests that Joe will devolve into a simple blackmail story (and maybe if this had been made in the eighties it would have), but it turns out that Joe thinks Bill has done the world a favor, and the two strike up an uneasy, and somewhat one-sided friendship.

As the title suggests, the movie is far more concerned with developing Peter Boyle’s character than Dennis Patrick’s. Although throughout the years many movies have explored the consequences of an accidental killing, this should have devoted more time to Patrick’s tight-laced executive. He proves the more interesting character of the two, and by far the less rooted in cliché: after all, Joe is a racist, right wing, gun collecting nut job — a citified redneck of the first order. He rants, raves, and boozes it up; and like every other working man in the movies he goes bowling each week. Although we don’t see him smack his wife around, he’s short as hell with her — and Boyle plays Joe as a ticking time bomb, which of course he turns out to be. Boyle was a gifted actor who does much with his part, but Patrick matches him scene for scene in the more difficult and far less showy role.

Director John G. Avildsen does fine with Norman Wexler’s Oscar nominated script, and the film boasts one good scene after the next. The best concerns a dinner party at Joe’s house. The strange circumstances of the friendship are briefly forgotten and the film becomes concerned with the culture clash between haughty Central park West and lowbrow Astoria, Queens. The men take a backseat while the wives (K Callan and Audrey Caire) steal the show. Curtains and Chinese food were never the source of such tension. This sort of thing has been done a million times over the years, but hardly ever so well. A later scene finds Joe and Bill searching the Village for Joe’s missing daughter. They fall in with some hippies for a culture clash of a different sort. In terms of plot development a lot happens here, but it’s worth watching for Avildsen’s ability to believably shepherd a scene through fast, smooth transitions from situation comedy, through sex, and ultimately, to violence — all the while connecting the transitions with believable dialogue.

The film’s climax is extremely silly and hard to swallow. Bit since Joe is so worthwhile I won’t spoil the ending — though the climax is of the sort that comes to the writer in a moment of inspiration and then requires the narrative to be contrived from that point backwards. In this case the machinations required to get us to the payoff just don’t work — the coincidences involved are worthy of Saving Private Ryan. Joe wants to be a morality story, but would have been a much more successful character study. It tries too hard to be too many things to too many people, and falls short in nearly every case. But it sure is a far out trip.

Joe (1970)

Grade: C

Directed by John G. Avildsen

Starring Peter Boyle, Dennis Patrick, and Susan Sarandon

Released by Cannon Productions

Running time: 107 minutes

Availability: DVD, Netflix