1980 Week: Just Tell Me What You Want

          With some failed films, it’s easy to identify the main problem—bad timing, a miscast actor, a weak script—but with others, diagnosing what went wrong requires a more holistic approach. Nearly everyone involved in the flop romantic comedy Just Tell Me What You Want is highly proficient, from director Sidney Lumet to leading man Alan King, and the film is impeccable from a technical perspective. Plus, it’s not as if Jay Presson Allen’s script, adapted from her own novel, is a complete disaster; although the jokes don’t land and the tone is all over the place, the character work is strong. And while it’s always easy to blame the failure of an Ali MacGraw movie on MacGraw, one of the least skilled actors ever to achieve above-the-title stardom, it wasn’t impossible for gifted directors to pull serviceable work out of her, as Lumet occasionally does here.

          So the problem with Just Tell Me What You Want is simply everything about the movie. It’s a comedy that isn’t funny, a romance about self-absorbed people whose love lives don’t engender empathy, and a narrative mishmash blending boardroom intrigue, showbiz satire, and other elements into an overarching storyline far too meager to support the extra weight of thematic heaviosity. However because Just Tell Me What You Want is made so well, it’s a bad film that looks and feels very much like a good film.

          The main plot involves the on-again/off-again romance between super-rich businessman Max Hershel (King) and his mistress, TV producer “Bones” Burton (MacGraw). How much of a prick is Max? He put his alcoholic wife into an institution, he yells at his employees, he makes degrading sexual remarks to every young woman he encounters, and he casually drops the c-word when denigrating ladies who anger him. He’s also a ruthless businessman, planning to buy a movie studio just so he can liquidate assets and pave over the studio’s physical plant. “Bones” isn’t any more appealing. A cynical careerist who uses her relationship with Max for financial gain, she casually embarks on an affair with a young writer (Peter Weller), perhaps because she’s aware that Max regularly dallies with other women. And when circumstances inevitably drive “Bones” and Max apart, he exacts cruel revenge by seizing all her financial assets, suggesting she was essentially a whore living off his largesse, despite her Emmy-winning stature in the TV industry.

          Viewed in the broadest strokes, Just Tell Me What You Want is thoroughly distasteful—but closer inspection reveals attributes. King gives a terrifically committed performance, and MacGraw is livelier than usual, though still quite stilted. Supporting players Weller, Myrna Loy (in her last screen appearance), and Kennan Wynn are wonderful. And every so often, a truthful insight emerges through the dense fog of Allen’s pretentious dialogue. Whether you’re willing to tolerate the movie’s shortcomings might depend on your ability to endure Max spewing this kind of vitriol: “I wouldn’t call that bitch a taxi to take her to hell!” Romantic comedy? Not so much. Acidic character study? Closer to the mark.

Just Tell Me What You Want: FUNKY

Players (1979)

          The rapid decline of model-turned-actress Ali MacGraw’s screen career continued with Players, a misfire produced by her ex-husband, Robert Evans. Having established her inability to deliver emotionally convincing performances in hits (1970’s Love Story) and misses (1978’s Convoy), she attempted the challenging role of a cynical jet-setter whose heart opens when she falls for a younger man. While MacGraw is not as screamingly awful here as she is in some of her other films, she can’t conjure the complexity or heat that any number of her contemporaries could have brought to the role. Which is not to say that if, say, Faye Dunaway or Diane Keaton had been cast in the leading role, Players would have been special. The movie’s problems run too deep. The story, revolving around the MacGraw character’s entanglement with a headstrong tennis player, is clichéd and episodic and tiresome. Worse, MacGraw’s costar, Dean Paul Martin, is even more of a mannequin than MacGraw. So if you want to experience two handsomely photographed hours of tennis scenes interspersed with repetitive and trivial vignettes of attractive people making out and breaking up, then Players is the movie for you. Otherwise, beware.

          Martin, the ill-fated son of beloved entertainer Dean Martin, plays Chris, an American tennis player competing in his first Wimbledon championship match. He’s distracted from his game by flashbacks to his on-again/off-again relationship with Nicole (MacGraw). After meeting in Mexico City, they took up housekeeping in her sprawling villa, even though she was engaged to super-rich European businessman Marco (Maximilian Schell). Adopting Chris as a sort of pet project, Nicole guided his transformation from hustler to professional, connecting him with big-time coach Pancho Gonzales (a real-life former world champion who plays himself). Predictably, a love-versus-money crisis emerged when Chris pushed Nicole to choose between their romance and her comfy future with Marco. And that’s basically the whole story, give or take a few sex scenes and training montages.

          Players is one of those bad movies that feels very much like a good movie, since the slick plotting—by Arnold Schulman, who gets a fancy playwright-style credit after the opening title—gracefully bounces back and forth between flashbacks and present-day scenes. The production values are beyond reproach, with glamorous international locations (including the real Wimbledon court), impressive celebrity cameos (John McEnroe, Liv Ullman, etc.), and marvelous music and photography. Players has everything money can buy, though what it really needs are the things that stem from organic creativity: compelling characters, narrative originality, real emotion. Some may enjoy this movie for its glossy textures, though most will fade long before the picture grinds toward its inconsequential climax. As for MacGraw, she makes a respectable effort here but, unfortunately, she cannot will natural talent into being, The failure of Players was one more humiliating step toward has-been status, a fate only briefly forestalled by some high-profile TV work in the mid-’80s.

Players: FUNKY

Convoy (1978)

          A sad spectacle representing the near-end of a once-glorious career, Convoy was not director Sam Peckinpah’s final film, but it might as well have been. (He only made one more picture, the lifeless ’80s espionage flick The Osterman Weekend.) Virtually a lampoon of every theme and visual device Peckinpah used in his previous films, Convoy is as vapid as the director’s other pictures are meaningful, so watching the movie is like seeing a faded singer struggle through greatest hits he can no longer perform with the proper energy. Exacerbating its lack of artistic worth, Convoy was the production that finally destroyed Peckinpah’s fragile reputation in Hollywood, since substance abuse often left him so debilitated that his friend James Coburn had to step in and direct several scenes. Even with the extra help, Convoy came in over-budget and over-schedule, guaranteeing no reputable producer would hire Peckinpah for years.

         Providing the final insult, Convoy became Peckinpah’s biggest box-office success.

         Yes, despite making provocative classics like The Wild Bunch (1969) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Peckinpah wasn’t fully embraced by American moviegoers until he helmed a trucker flick that was adapted from a novelty song. The song, of course, was C.W. McCall’s “Convoy,” the 1975 hit in which McCall narrated the tale of a rebel trucker’s adventure while cheesy music composed by future Mannheim Steamroller leader Chip Davis grooved underneath. Screenwriter B.W.L. Norton translated the song quite literally, presenting the idiotic story of badass trucker Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald (Kris Kristofferson) forming a giant convoy of 18-wheelers to battle corrupt Sheriff “Dirty Lyle” Wallace (Ernest Borgnine).

          Yet Norton should probably be held blameless for the incoherent weirdness of the final film, since Peckinpah rewrote the script before and during production, even taking the extreme of letting his cast contribute material whether or not the material actually fit the overall storyline. Worse, Peckinpah dug into the tropes of his earlier movies, layering in endless scenes of property destruction, slow-motion violence, and sweaty men stirring up trouble. Whenever Convoy enters a sloppy montage of barroom brawling or cars crashing through buildings, the movie becomes a parody of Peckinpah’s wild-man style.

         Had the filmmaker demonstrated any discipline or restraint, Convoy could easily have become a fun B-movie about outlaws fighting the man. Certainly, the casting of the lead roles pointed the way toward something unpretentiously enjoyable. Singer-turned-actor Kristofferson, at the height of his beardy handsomeness, exudes rock-star cool, so he cuts a great figure steering an 18-wheeler while wearing aviator shades and a wife-beater. Borgnine, his gap-toothed swarthiness in full bloom, personifies redneck villainy. Yet Peckinpah puts so much crap between these characters—driving montages, explosions, pointless scenes featuring Kristofferson’s love interest, played by Ali MacGraw with her usual ineptitude—that the basic story gets bludgeoned to death. Convoy ends up feeling like a fever dream instead of a narrative, so it’s fascinating for all the wrong reasons.

Convoy: FREAKY

The Getaway (1972)

          Beloved by many action-movie fans for its intense mixture of double-crosses, sexual intrigue, and violent showdowns, The Getaway was a significant box-office hit for director Sam Peckinpah and star Steve McQueen, both of whom were at commercial crossroads after indulging themselves with financially unsuccessful passion projects. The Getaway is not, however, among the best movies either man made. Convoluted, sleazy, and sluggish, the picture has a few memorable moments, but events on the periphery of the main storyline often distract from the principal narrative.

          McQueen plays “Doc” McCoy, a career criminal whom we meet while he’s imprisoned. Realizing he’s unlikely to earn parole, Doc asks his wife, Carol (Ali MacGraw), to contact Jack Benyon (Ben Johnson), a businessman/criminal with political connections. Benyon gets Doc released in exchange for Doc’s promise to pull an elaborate job. Predictably, the minute Doc performs the crime, Doc and Carol realize they’ve been set up, so the bulk of the film comprises their attempts to escape Benyon’s ruthless minions and exact revenge.

          Peckinpah stages action in his usual style, blending frenetic cuts with lyrical slow-motion interludes, so scenes of guns-a-blazin’ mayhem have power; furthermore, screenwriter Walter Hill, adapting a novel by crime-fiction legend Jim Thompson, keeps things terse. Yet it’s hard to settle into the rhythms of the movie, partially because the lead characters are awful people—when Doc finds out Carol slept with Benyon to expedite Doc’s release, for instance, Doc slugs her—and partially because Peckinpah gets distracted by nonsense. In particular, the director wastes a lot of screen time on a subplot in which one of Benyon’s goons, Rudy (Al Lettieri), kidnaps a veterinarian and his wife, then seduces the wife in full view of the veterinarian, thereby deriving erotic glee from humiliating a nobody. (The wife is played by Sally Struthers, of All in the Family fame, in a screechy performance.)

          Perhaps the moment that best captures the excess of The Getaway is the bit during which Doc and Carol are dumped out of the back of a garbage truck—Peckinpah lingers on the image of two glamorous stars surrounded by junk as if it’s the height of cinematic irony. Were the entire movie not suffused with sludge, literally and metaphorically, this dramatic moment might have meant more; as is, it’s just one more unpleasant scene in a disposable movie. The Getaway was remade in 1994 with then-married stars Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger taking over the leading roles, but even with steamy sex scenes and a vivacious supporting performance by James Woods (as Benyon), the 1994 picture is no more a classic than the Peckinpah film.

The Getaway: FUNKY

Love Story (1970) & Oliver’s Story (1978)

          The cinematic equivalent of Wonder bread, this by-the-numbers tearjerker somehow became one of the defining hits of the early ’70s, earning $100 million at a time when few movies ever hit that milestone, much less low-budget melodramas. Weirder still, when screenwriter Erich Segal was asked by Paramount to create a novel of his script as a means of drumming up pre-release hype for the film, the book became a runaway hit, eventually moving more than 20 million copies. That’s a whole lot of marketplace excitement for a movie whose opening voiceover reveals the vapidity of its narrative: “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?” The answer to that question is, apparently, little more than is actually contained within the question itself, because Love Story is 90 minutes of foreplay leading to a bummer ending. Obviously millions of people bought into the thin premise of excitable rich kid Oliver (Ryan O’Neal) falling for saintly working-class girl Jenny (Ali MacGraw).
          The repetitive, plot-deficient first hour comprises chipper scenes about young love set against the rarified backdrop of the Harvard campus (trivia lovers dig the fact that Oliver was partially inspired by two of Segal’s real-life Harvard homeys, Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones). The promising glimmer of a subplot about Oliver’s uptight dad (Ray Milland) disapproving of Jenny doesn’t amount to much; after papa detaches the couple from the family teat, Jenny works as a teacher to pay Oliver’s way through law school, after which he lands a cushy job at a law firm. The only inkling of drama arrives two-thirds of the way through the film, when Jenny’s unnamed fatal illness is discovered. Yet even the main event is all hearts and flowers, because Jenny slips away without so much as a cough.
          It’s to director Arthur Hiller’s credit that the picture moves quickly even though it’s running on fumes from start to finish, because he doesn’t get much help from O’Neal or MacGraw, neither of whom summons believable emotion (O’Neal is marginally better, but MacGraw is quite awful). Only the melancholy piano theme, by composer Francis Lai, really connects, especially in the movie’s one cinematically interesting scene: After Oliver gets the bad news, he wanders city streets in a montage set to car horns and snippets from Lai’s theme. Still, it’s hard to genuinely hate Love Story, in the same way it’s hard to hate Wonder Bread: Neither pretends to be anything but a spongy mass of empty calories.
          Seven years after Love Story conquered the box office, Segal published a follow-up novel, Oliver’s Story. In the 1978 film adaptation, O’Neal and Milland reprise their roles for a threadbare narrative about Oliver trying to love again two years after the events of the first film; meanwhile, Oliver’s dad tries to draw his son into the family textile business even though Oliver is satisfied with his work as a do-gooder attorney. Poor Candice Bergen gets the thankless job of playing the woman who tries to romance grief-stricken Oliver. In trying to generate believable relationship obstacles, Segal and co-writer/director John Korty rely heavily on soap-opera tactics. Marcy (Bergen) is a rich girl who accepts class divisions without guilt, whereas Oliver is a bleeding-heart type who feels anguished about coming from money. Although Korty shoots locations well, particularly during an extended trip the lovers take to Hong Kong, he can’t surmount the absurdly contrived narrative or the severe limitations of the leading performances. Handicapped by trite characterizations, Bergen and O’Neal seem robotic. And just when the film’s portrayal of Oliver as a saint becomes insufferable, the plot contorts itself to ruin Oliver’s second chance at love. Yet whereas Love Story earned enmity by being manipulative, Oliver’s Story merely earns indifference by being pointless.

Love Story: LAME
Oliver's Story: LAME