In Memorium One Year On: Karen Black WAS the Seventies

In early 1970s, there was a surplus of straight-haired slap-free studiedly nonchalant actresses in Hollywood – Katherine Ross, Jennifer O’ Neill, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw - all supposedly embodying the fruits of freedom as borne by the stinking sixties. In truth though, the New Hollywood was Testosterone Town, and Ross’s appearance in The Stepford Wives in 1975 would seem to be the logical conclusion of the half-decade.

This was also the late Karen Black’s time, but she’d be forever an outsider in said sorority. Her ripe-lipped rapaciousness and blazing sapphire eyes marked her out as too bizarre for romantic leads and too sexy for character roles. She looked - always - as though she’d dine on leading men, so it was a constant source of amazement to me that Tarantino never snapped her up from the cult straight-to-home-viewing treadmill she was on for the last 25 years of her career, in order to play a no-restraint-brooking leather-clad motorcycle mama, or something.

The former Karen Blanche Zeigler was born in Illinois in 1939 and paid her dues on the Great White Way before her pal Jack Nicholson cast her as an acid-tripping whore in 1969’s Easy Rider. The following year she turned in an Oscar-nominated performance as Nicholson’s trashily endearing girlfriend Rayette, in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Probably her most revered role, it’s a mercy in some ways that her character’s persona wasn’t an indication of things to come. For Rayette is needy, clammy and passive. It hardly seems accidental that she’s got ‘Stand by Your Man’ blaring from her Dansette when we first see her. But she’s also warm, loyal, romantic and real.

As Rayette in Five Easy Pieces (1970)

As a wannabe country singer and an unselfconscious, coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the warm-hearted barmaid), Rayette was the start of something in the sense that she’s the first in a line of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the gravitational pull of their backgrounds. Nicholson’s class-tourist treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of this film, until he perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a volte-face, a rare display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make Rayette’s heart burst.

With Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike (1972)

From here, Black switched between cult credibility (opposite Kris Kristofferson and several bricks of hash in Cisco Pike, as a smack-addicted hooker in The Pyx) and blockbuster corn (the stewardess called upon to fly a cast of ageing legends to safety in Airport 75).

In Nashville (1975)

But it was in Hollywood’s partially faithful versions of the cream of American literature that she truly shone, playing two working-class girls who meet premature ends before their respective bitterness curdles their beauty, which may be the only power they have. (In some ways, she was continuing a tradition previously served so well by Gloria Grahame.)

Jazz Age Jezebel: As Myrtle in The Great Gatsby (1974)

Her Myrtle in The Great Gatsby was a million miles away, physically, from the fleshy slattern that F. Scott Fitzgerald described, but, moving languidly across the screen, her hair the colour of dried blood, Black’s Myrtle is bursting with sensuality and frustration, bringing a desperate pathos to the shimmering soft focus of what’s ultimately an interesting failure.

In John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust, adapted from Nathaniel West’s savage, nihilistic novel about Hollywood’s Depression-era desperados, she was wannabe starlet Faye Greener, cruel and sexy in a solarised, platinumed bob, lashing out like a burned cat at the kind acts of Donald’s Sutherland’s tragic simpleton. Her portrayal of that vile, talentless, narcissistic, spite-ridden girl was a study in soft-focus sadness; in short, she was the rotten heart of a movie dealing with (in West's partisan view) a rotten town.

Hollywood Gothic: Day of the Locust (1974)

 She took the lead in all three sections of Trilogy of Terror, almost upstaged in the exoticism stakes by a Zuni doll, which chases her around her apartment with hilarious, murderous intent, and even stood out amid the constellation of stars in Robert Altman’s Nashville, where she’s disturbingly convincing as a dumb, arrogant broad. The following year, 1976, she was bewigged, ruthless and cool as a julep in Hitchcock’s pitiful swansong, Family Plot.

It's got TEETH! Trilogy of Terror (1975)

Only in Hollywood could a woman of prodigious intelligence (Black entered higher education at 15) and singular looks be thought unlucky. But starting at the top, she seems to have managed to exploit said qualities handsomely: her filmography suggests a work ethic of Leviathan proportions and a total lack of cultural snobbery (e.g. House of 1000 Corpses and Stuck! Steve Balderson’s 2009 homage to ‘70s babes-in-the-slammer flicks in which Black co-starred with Mink Stole, would struggle to claim even cult status.)

Giving Jennifer Coolidge sleepless nights in House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Black sang too – and even did so once with L7, of all people. She also sang in Nashville and Gypsy 83 (2001), in which she was touching as a sad-eyed, never-was lounge-pop crooner, chuffing on cigarillos and flicking her marabou stole. But her standing in the musical world is arguably stronger in terms of her name than her (good) voice, all thanks to schlock-horror performance-art metallers and underground legends, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. They’ve never been known to make their audiences comfortable, much like their strangely beautiful and beautifully strange namesake.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Being  all '70s, like

the 1970s version of the 1930s at its zenith, in Day of the Locust (1974)

Smokin'

"Hey Honey - don't call ME Mac!" Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Fay takes a break from spite. Day of the Locust (1974)

In Killer Fish (1979)

With Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969)

Eternal Summertime Sadness: With William Atherton in Day of the Locust (1974)

Karen Blanche Ziegler 1939-2013

                                                                                                                                           

She Walked Alone: Female Rebels, Loners, Anti-Heroines and Outsiders in Film

With his broad-shoulders half lit by seedy neon and his facial crags fleetingly illuminated by a shuddering Zippo flame, The Male Loner is over-represented in film. Male collectivity was relatively rare in cinema until all those bromance and buddy flicks came along to bore us the collective shit out of us. There always were exceptions of course – the films of Peckinpah, John Cassavetes’ 1970 film Husbands, queer cinema like Boys in the Band and certain war films and westerns. But even the latter two tended to focus on a renegade soldier, general or nameless vigilante rather than battalion banter or saloon solidarity: the great rebel male goes it alone. 

But with female characters, collectivity has been huge, whether in solidarity (Busby Berkley musicals, How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Group, Nine to Five, Thelma and Louise, Steel Magnolias, Bridesmaids etc) or bitchery (The Women, Stage Door, Mean Girls). The message has mainly been that men are self-reliant and women co-dependent. But for every male outsider, whether it’s Mitchum, Garfield, Brando, Dean, McQueen, Newman, DeNiro or Gosling, there’s always been a straight-talking sister, rebel girl, lone lady, morose misfit and no-bull broad. Some are cultural icons, some cult curios – and none of them need you or anyone else.

Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer in Frances (1982)

Ready for combat: Lange as Farmer

Of course, we’re dealing with the real life of an actual flesh-and-blood outsider heroine here, as interpreted by Lange in an intuitive, violent and sensitive performance. But this film, for all its flaws, liberties and inaccuracies is how most people came to ‘know’ the tragic story of the ‘Bad Girl of Seattle’ (this, or a later acquaintance with Nirvana’s In Utero and this song). But was Frances Farmer (1913-1970) bad? Or mad? Clearly neither, but rather a gobby anomaly; a punk on remand at Paramount, a leftist adrift in La-La Land, a foul-mouthed feminist who neither knew nor needed that title. Few outsider heroines lived the nightmare like Farmer, a misfit in every sphere: a socialist, atheist, intellectual teenage girl in the 1930s, a Hollywood star who couldn’t stick gossamer glamour, publicity or film-making, an off-Broadway actress used by producers to get backing for their plays, an alcoholic on the run from the law and ultimately, a none-more-sane inmate of a Dickensian asylum, locked for a half-decade in a primitive ward for the incurably insane. 

Frances Farmer in 1940

Lange takes Farmer from stubborn schoolgirl to reluctant goddess to liquored-up firebrand to a hollow-eyed, fragile matron clad in black as if in mourning for her ruined life. But she also demonstrates that at every age, Farmer was a woman who clung with white-knuckled fervour to her sense of self. When she fights with her vile gorgon of a mother, with the police, paparazzi, psychiatrists or orderlies, I think of the real-life 1943 newspaper reports from when Farmer was arrested in downtown Los Angeles for violating her parole: “By all accounts, Miss Farmer did not surrender peacefully.” 

Farmer after her arrest in 1943

She survived her horrific years of unjust incarceration, but returned to the bottle, which aided the creep of cancer which did for her at the shockingly premature age of 56. Even if she did end up burned out on the bonfire of idealism, Farmer had stuck to her guns even when they were turned to her temples (as Roger Ebert said of Frances: “It shows it’s possible for everything to go wrong [in a life]”) – and she’s still cited today as a heroine to thousands who’ve stuck to theirs in extreme adversity.

“Miss Farmer did not surrender peacefully . . .”

Solitary: Lange as Farmer

Sigourney Weaver as Lt Ellen Ripley in the Alien Trilogy (1979, 1986 and 1992)

'nuff said

One of the greatest female characters in 120 years of cinema, in any discussion about Ripley the Renegade it’s inevitable that some purse-lipped sad-sack will point out that the role was originally written as a man. So? And William of Orange was Dutch and spaghetti comes from China. The fact is, the former Susan Weaver is Ripley.

It would belabour a point to say too much about Ripley - reams have been written on her unblinking militaristic gumption, seal-sleek skin aglow with combat toil and the flames reflected in her incredulous eyes. Ripley’s not fearless – but she is astonishingly brave. She’s as human as her nemesis is, um, alien.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated that at the climax of the first film of the trilogy, when tremulous with terror and her nerves ripped raw, she steadies herself by humming the dulcet notes of a nursery rhyme while clambering into her space suit in order to not alert the stowaway alien, who is snoozing ’neath the pipes and no doubt dribbling acid.

She’s seen as the benevolent force in this haunted-mansion-in-outer-space trilogy and is undoubtedly the one we root for. Yet in her own fashion, she’s as much a lone killer and harbringer of destruction, carnage and death as is the Alien Queen. And she battles alone: her allies are always dispensable and it’s always just her and the descendants of her original enemy, ultimately.

Thirty-five years on, and there have never been any serious contenders for her crown (though in Aliens, Jeanette Goldstein’s ripped marine, Vazquez, briefly made Ripley look like a Big Girl’s Blouse): no one else is fit to wear her cracked-yet-impenetrable armour.

Jane Fonda as Gloria Beatty in They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969)

Never no Glory

Sic transit Gloria mundi. Fonda’s palpably bitter and sneering nihilist is the black heart of this adaptation of Horace McCoy’s 1935 existential pulp novel about the futility and grasping desperation of life. Gloria is one of many Depression-era desperadoes seeking hope in eternally sun-dappled California. But circumstance, the indifference of Hollywood and a belly rumbling like a boxcar force her to join a dance marathon at the Santa Monica Pier ballroom in 1932.

Gloria is what Pollyanna the Glad Girl might have turned out like had she been slung into reform school aged 11. She’s so bruised by life and crackling with misanthropy that she cannot and will not trust another human being. She’s an avowed loner. She’s not without mordant wit (“Maybe the whole damn world’s just like Central Casting. They got it all rigged ‘fore you ever show up.”) and almost smiles once, while relating to her dance partner a story about a sick dog she once cared for. But then misery steals across her taut features again as she recalls the hound’s painful fate. “Doesn’t matter,” she snaps. “Forget it.”

Danse Macabre

By the last quarter of the film, Gloria is pantingly fierce: her once smart, tight Marcel Wave - a symbol of putting her best foot forward - has exploded into loose, crazed curls; her sleep-deprived eyes are angry and as red as a sunset; her limbs look painfully lean; she looks like she smells of stale sweat and Lucky Strikes, has rank breath and teeth fizzing with sugary corrosion. She’s close to breaking but still takes no shit from anyone, least of all men.

She does give up - but arranges her own fate. And it’s equal parts cowardly and brave, like most humans when faced with their mortality. Gloria’s not too sensitive for this world – she’s too wise for it. She’s seen it writhing bloodily with its skin ripped off and, in disgust, decides to leave it to the foolish hopers.

Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933)

Hard-knock life for Lil'

A girl’s gotta live somehow. This Pre-Code Depression-era gritfest is a Stanwyck classic. Lily is a barmaid in her snake of a father’s speakeasy in the soot-sodden steel mill hell of Pittsburgh: a city where the streetlamps are lit at noon and hope is drowned in hooch. OK, so she shapes up as a gold-digger, but the only other life she’s fit for is the horrid one she’s trying to escape.

*Almost* a reason to put up with Pittsburgh

Her end goal isn’t really glittering mink and an Art Deco Park Avenue duplex (though she gets these): it’s security, independence, autonomy. With her background, the best she can hope for if she follows the path of decency is one where she’ll be wasting her looks and wits in the boss’s outer office, chained to the stenograph. Girls like Lily, then as now, will grab at the first chance to be delivered from a lifetime of drudgery. Can you say you wouldn’t do the same?

Lily’s dad offers his daughter to a corrupt local politician in return for protection. She pours scalding coffee in his lap and says with emasculating sarcasm: “Oh I’m sorry. My hand shakes so when I’m near you!” Poppa’s still later explodes in his face and after his funeral, Lily visits her crusty old mentor, who’s mad about Nietzsche but also full of Puritan Homilies as dictated by Will Hays. He declares she must go forth into the world and USE MEN – but with purity! With decency! Lily lights her cigarette, looks up at him half in disbelief half in pity, and says: “I got four bucks, where am I supposed to go, Paris?”

Chico and Lily: sisters under the skin

That city comes later. Now though, she and her fellow barmaid Chico hitch a boxcar to NYC where Lily works and sleeps her way to the top of a Wall Street bank. Soon, she’s incredibly gowned in Lucien Lelong, dripping cabochon diamonds, her once soft, wholesome ash-blonde hair now undulating in sculpted, metallic waves. She’s not hard-but-gooey-inside, like an over-chilled soft centre - she’s hard, hard, hard all the way through, like school. You look for flashes of conscience in vain for most of the film (not unusual in pre-code). She moves from the boss to the boss’s son. She packs away half a million dollars in jewels alone. One man loses his job, wife and family over her, but she moves on with nary a backward glance. 

Getting what you want . . .

One night he turns up at her apartment begging for her love. She slams the door on him and tells her current beau it was a telegram boy. But we root for Lily still. She’s a woman alone thinking of her future – a thing she once didn’t have. She’s fiercely loyal to Chico (when one lover says “Can’t you get rid of that fantastic black maid?” Lily snaps “Chico stays!”) and later describes herself as having lost her kindness through bitter circumstance and a need to survive, and if you didn’t already understand her motives, you do then: dealt a bad hand, she reshuffled the deck.

Lily and Chico - make mine mink!

Sissy Spacek as Carrie White in Carrie (1976)

The teenage years: a veil of blood and tears

I first saw Carrie when I was 12 and I was upset and scared in equal measure. Upset because I too was as popular as the pox and had to admit to myself that I identified with her (it’d be a few more years before I’d be able to take the wind from my detractors’ sails by discovering I was actually proud to be the things they ribbed me for) and scared because it suggested that perhaps, there were no happy endings for misfits. I didn’t help that I read the Stephen King novel shortly after; Carrie’s backstory broke my heart. King described the abuse and suffering heaped on this innocent soul - from her grisly birth to her miserable demise - with an extraordinary compassion (it’s a book that can make you a better person, undoubtedly). 

Spacek, who occasionally blots her copy book with luvvyish bull about her profession, hit the nail on the head when she created a creature of enormous sympathy in this freckled, folorn, doormat-in-a-world-of-platform-heels. Unaccountably and very sadly, Carrie’s actually a sweet girl, when you’d imagine her to be bitter as all get-out. Furthermore, though Carrie is friendless, hurt, alone and regularly beaten by her religious nut mother, she’s not quite beat. She still tries, still hopes. She even tells her mother (played by defused former 1950s sex bomb Piper Laurie in a performance that seems designed for drag queen imitations) that she wants to “try and become a whole person before it’s too late.” For this touching hope she gets a cup of coffee chucked in her face. But she’s quietly rebellious – she tries to be that person.

" 'You're beautiful' said Tommy. She was."

And when she finally gets what seems like her chance and is crowned Prom Queen, her vile classmates drench her soft amber tresses and ivory satin gown in thick, unctuous, pig plasma, skin and entrails. (In my alternate version, Carrie then licks her lips, goes “Mmmm!”, then performs a full striptease, throwing her clot-covered clobber at her enemies, piece by piece, before the carnage commences). She claws at the air, looking like a horrific fire-and-brimstone drawing from an illustrated version of the Old Testament. Then the hurt turns to rage. All those years of never giving as good as she got have backed up and their force when released is a veritable banquet of revenge. I smile when I see her teachers and peers die screaming in flames, frying like meat or being mangled in car crashes. Not that I’d wish this on anyone in real life, but Carrie stands as a warning to all you bullies out there. We stride out into the world with a little bit of hope, then you try and kick, beat and wrangle it out of us for having had the audacity to be born different. It might look like you’re succeeding, too. But one day, one day . . .

Carrie: wet nightmares

I had my own Carrie moment not long after I first saw it. A porcine-faced school bully with a curiously wheezy, high-pitched voice (which made him sound like Phil Mitchell being shagged with an outsize strap-on) poured a can of Coke over my head at the bus stop in middle of town. Some kids laughed, some adults tutted, but no one reproached him (guess he were just dousing me in sugary slurp, not dumping a sow’s innards on me). After giving him a hurt sideways glance as beads of brown liquid dripped from my eyelashes, I opted for what I thought were a cool, slightly swaggering Outsider’s Retreat (I’d also recently discovered the films of Steve McQueen & Paul Newman), though I could almost feel my soul shrivelling with humiliation. The bully, I’ve since heard, made a memorable appearance on a cable TV show called I’m So Fat I Can’t Find My Penis.

Gena Rowlands as Gloria Swenson in Gloria (1980)

Oh yeeeeeeah.

G.L.O.R.I.A! Anyone who knows me well knows that if this list had order, Gloria would take Gold. As directed by husband John Cassavates, Rowlands’s fast-talking, tough-walking, Virginia-Slim chuffing ex-moll, former jailboid and unwitting mater dolorosa has heart, soul and sass. She flexes her Joisey roots in her gravelly tones and big, honeyed hairdo. She looks like a Gentile Lauren Bacall, or what Anne Sothern might have ended up like had she not gotten into the movies.

Gloria: twice as fierce

Gloria’s neighbour keeps books for the mob, but has been embezzling funds. They’re onto him, and he knows it’s curtains for him and his family. So he sends Phil (John Adames) his youngest, round to Gloria’s apartment down the hall. The gunshots ring out and Gloria and her solemn little soldier are soon on the run.

Reluctant as hell, she hastily packs her kimono and pistol and ushers herself and the kid down the back stairs through an atmosphere of fear thick as smoke. You know she’s never again going see all the things that have made her new life worth living – “My apoartment, my clothes, my shoes, my friends . . . some”. But she does the right thing and the two of them blaze a taut, fraught and deadly trail across Brooklyn, the Bronx and New Jersey pursued by the Gloria’s old mob cronies through bars, flop houses, stations, subways and crack dens.

Lioness of the Bronx

Gloria’s not maternal (“I was always a broad – never could stand the smell of milk”) but what else is she doing but defending Phil’s life to the death? It’s a tedious trope for tough-as-titanium female characters to be revealed at some point as ‘vulnerable’, but Gloria never is (and who’d believe it anyway?) What she is though, is compassionate. Mobster’s Mistress turned Mother Courage.

Gloria’s not totally phlegmatic, and she clearly often feels the total danger of her situation. But when she does, she stares it dead.in.the.face. (The first time I saw this film on the big screen a few years ago, the scene in which Gloria overturns an entire car full of macho hoods with just a couple of shots from her gun had people punching the air and going “WOOO-HOOO!”) She shimmies up and down crumbling stairwells and fire escapes, the heartbreakingly sweet and wise orphaned Phil hiding in the folds of her skirt; she holds up an entire apartment full of molls, whores and a well-armed greaseball; she escapes from the enemy (again) on a crowded subway car, giving her the best line in the film as she backs away from the train across the platform, her teeth gritted, her eyes furious, gun held aloft: “Sissies! So you let a woman beat ya, ha? Yer PUNKS!”

She does all of this in high-heels and with no help from a soul. Even her natural allies – bartenders, hookers and waitresses, all fail her. Time and again, she proves the fallacy of her own weary maxim that you can’t beat the system. (When Phil asks her what ‘the system is’, she’s tells him she’s no idea. “How d’ya know you can’t beat it then?” he says.)

I won’t spoil the ending of this film. (Though you may have already seen it in Luc Besson’s Leon which had Jean Reno effectively in the Gloria role and Natalie Portman in Phil’s.) Gloria itself was remade in 1999 with Sharon Stone in the title role. Though Stone need not be in any way ashamed of her performance, the film, like 99 per cent of remakes, was in no way necessary. After Rowlands’ Gloria, any imitation could only ever be as pale as a Xerox of a Xerox.

Gloria: smoke and mirrors

Thora Birch as Enid in Ghost World (2000)

"Enid the Iconoclast!"

Enid the Iconoclast sounds like a superheroine by way of a no-nonsense Northern dinner lady (and they’re an imperious breed, let me tell you) but that’s what she is – or wants to be (an iconoclast that is). The gap between what we are and what we hope to become seems as narrow when you’re a teen as it does when you’re gallon drunk at a much more advanced age. But you wouldn’t know it with Enid. She isn’t the first bored, truculent and directionless teen who, finding her turn-of-the-century world and peers lacking, seeks solace and identity in the sounds and looks of ’77.

In her unlovely and lonely corner of an outer LA suburb, choked with neon and smog, multiplexes and parking lots, her inability to relate to anyone of her generation leads her to hook up with Steve Buscemi’s sad-eyed blues-loving fellow loner, thereby inadvertently wrecking her own hopes of escape and his career in the process. 

"Lemme sketch a portrait of my hate"

She has the typical superiority complex of the alienated alterna-teen (“I’m so sick of these obnoxious, pseudo-Bohemian losers” she chuffs of her peers) and a fearless, spicy nastiness of wit (“He’d better be careful or he might catch AIDS when he date rapes her.”)





Failed by her crypto-Republican best mate Rebecca (a pre-peroxide Scarlett Johansson), confused by her feelings for Seymour and believing she’s going to lose her kind, gentle father (Bob Balaban) to his second wife, she finds solace in the memories of childhood as prompted by a twee little 7-inch record. She’s only 18 and already looking back rather than forward. But after getting caught up in a philistine scandal that costs her the one chance of escape she had, she takes her destiny in hand and bravely honours her dreams of leaving – alone.

When I first saw Ghost World I thought they were trying to show us how punk Enid was by dint of her red-flag-to-the-mean-girls name alone – I mean: Enid! But in America, Enid (and Thora) aren’t old ladies’ names as they are here on Airstrip One where “Enid, played by Thora . . .” reads like a credit from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. On the other hand “Rebecca, played by Scarlett . . .” puts us firmly in Red Shoe Dairies territory. Hmmm.

Enid's World

Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in Der Blaue Engel (1930)

File under 'legend'

The silk-stocking-and-suspender clad thighs of the heartless Lola-Lola are ultimate emblems of the Weimar Republic’s twilight years. Dietrich’s final film as a mere mortal (as opposed to living legend) and her first film with Josef von Sternberg cast the Teutonic goddess as a gleeful, natural saucestrel and anti-heroine. Her merciless destruction of the middle-class, hypocritical, lascivious and ultimately pathetic Professor Rath (Emil Jannings) is steady yet casual, malicious yet uncalculated. She’s not after wealth or position. She marries Rath as an act of mockery; he has little money and she knows that. The subsequent events suggest she’s avenging her sex and class with her treatment of Rath.

Professor Beware

Strutting around on the splintery stage of a smoky cabaret club in high-heels, frilly knickers and a top hat, Lola has probably earned more free beer than cash in her working life. Having no privileges, she’s created her own. She’s languid as a cat, and a symbol of what the bourgeoisie fears the most: a sexual, sensual destructoress who does not give a damn for you and your notions of what is Right and Proper and does not crave your approval or way of life.

You just know she’s made for lust more than love, and when she claims the opposite in that famous song, reclining on that beer keg and flashing more close-to-the-border-flesh than Hollywood would ever allow, those who aren’t spellbound are as dead as Prof Rath.

Pam Grier as Jackie Brown in Jackie Brown (1997)

Brown: in the Driver's Seat

Tarantino’s tale of a lone, middle-aged air hostess on the bottom rung of her profession was something of a departure for him. So much so that some audiences baulked and walked due to the lack of choreographed ultra-violence. But he seemed to realise that while sticking with a tried-and-tested formula might bring simpler, straightforward success, it would also lead to a far less interesting body of work. This is my personal Tarantino favourite. It proved he could deliver trenchant, rounded characters just as well as he could bruised fists, smoking guns and gushing blood – and that he was, in fact, a great director of women.

Brown’s sensational and casually-worn sexiness seems to have got her little materially, but it’s fed her self-assurance (or vice versa) and given her the confidence to carry off her illicit yet unglamorous sideline - until now.




Still, it’s a lonely life she leads and the pathos of her plight is highlighted when we see her return to her touchingly modest apartment, grim in its sparse neatness. It’s there that she and Robert Forster’s craggy-faced ageing fox talk about the passing of their respective years, dreams and hopes, of disappointments and arse-saggery. Brown doesn’t know what her future is going to hold but she knows what she wants and likes – we can see that in the swooning pleasure she takes in the sweetest soul music and her sensual enjoyment of a slowly smoked cigarette. She’s the brains behind the film’s central scam and fearless about executing it. She could lose her job, freedom or life in the process, but she’s willing to take that tightrope over the quicksand of the everyday. She’s cool as a julep whether being interrogated, held at gunpoint, stewing in the pen or grabbing her rightful share of a fortune in a nail-biting heist.

Jackie on the lam

Even the one time she loses her cool she reverts to Coffy, doing the motherfucking-finger-wagging-shoulder-shake and taking no prisoners. In the end, she heads off into the sunset after stirring feelings in Max he clearly thought he’d forgotten. She doesn’t beg him to join her – that’s not her style. The kiss she gives him says enough. Her expression in the unbroken and lengthy final shot as she drives away, silently mouthing the words to Across 110^th Street as it plays on her radio, is inscrutable.

Madonna as Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Susan’s a drifter, a rock ‘n’ roll hobo, a Greenwich Village gunslinger. She’s a playful, insouciant punk who smiles more than she sneers. Knows exactly what she wants and takes it. In other words, Madonna playing a version of herself at the time (hopefully, there’s no sequel in the offing – a yoga-mad Susan looking like a walnut-filled condom would ruin the illusion beyond repair). Susan has effortlessly turned her life into a vision of free-spirited paradise as coveted by Rosanna Arquette’s Roberta who has ended up married alive in the bourgeois graveyard of New Jersey’s moneyed suburbs.

Desert Island Shot

Susan blazes a casually chaotic trail across NYC, relying on few and pursued by many – some with murderous intent. Like a man, she takes her pleasures and vices more seriously than any of her emotions and is so funny and sexy and she’d probably snub Madonna as too humourless and ambitious to be interesting. Memorably yet stupidly described in one review as a ‘self-sufficient slut’ (which I think was intended to be a compliment), Susan actually seems to reserve her heart (but not her body) for only one man - Robert Joy’s runtish Jimmy.

'tude to spare - any takers?

Big-haired, bountiful of breast and never-knowingly overdressed, every time she appears on screen, klieg lights seem to come on and the poverty of the Soft Life roars at you. We’re all Roberta when we watch DSS – misfits craving the slapstick sin of lawless Big City Life as made so damn desirable by Susan. Only when you follow in her footsteps to a city of warehouse apartments, dive bars and pulsing netherworld clubs where everyone’s dressed like Someone Your Mother Warned You About will you feel this free.

Karen Black as Rayette DiPesto in Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Trying to make a case for Rayette as any kind of feminist heroine would be like trying to Instagram an avalanche. However, Black’s trashily endearing turn here is justly revered – and it’s she who is the film’s ultimate outsider, not Jack Nicholson’s class-tourist, Bobby.
  

As Bobby’s girl, sweet Rayette has ambitions to move up in the world – something Bobby either can’t or can’t be bothered to understand, having left behind his family of classical music geniuses for a life as a drifting roustabout.

As a wannabe country singer and an unselfconscious, coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the warm-hearted barmaid), Rayette was the start of something in the sense that she’s the first in a line of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the gravitational pull of their backgrounds, though they try with all their hearts.

Bobby treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of this film, until he perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a volte-face, a rare display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make Rayette’s already swollen heart burst.

Bobby & Ray in one of those moments that Make Up For It All

She’s warm, real, romantic, fun and loyal. She can be shit-sharp as a gangster, too: when Helena Kallianiotes's verbally aggressive hippy responds to Rayette’s openness and working-class charm by snapping “Hey – don’t call me honey, mac.” Rayette’s eyes flame and she spits: “Don’t call ME mac - HONEY!” Nor is she above a bout of red-blooded bitchery, sweetly saying to her classy yet cold love rival Catherine (Susan Anspach) “That’s a lovely head of hair you’ve got  -*beat*-  natural?” She is a vulnerable soul, it's true, but outsiders are not amorphous in every trait – they can be tender or tough.

Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Would he be really better off with his mother's eyes?

In this the Rolls Royce of horror films, Rosemary is manifestly not a hard-drinking, tough-talking dame. She’s not scraping by on her wits and wiles. Society at large approves of her; to all outward appearances, she and Guy (John Cassavetes) are part of the Establishment. She’s so bourgeois she even gets in a butler and bartender when she throws a party. But was there ever a woman more alone in her singular terror?

After Old Nick has gotten into her knickers and her strangulating foetus drains her of colour and comfort, each and every potential ally is despatched, disabled or safely out in the Midwest. She is alone. She becomes paranoid. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get her. When the coven decide it’s safe for her to venture out into the burning concrete jungle of high summertime New York  and put a halt her suffering, Farrow’s beleaguered gamin gets wise. Her stuttering, palpable jitters in that phone booth scene as she frantically tries to reach her doctor are visceral – you can almost feel the pure fear oozing from her pores and seeping all over her body like icy water (“Witches, witches all of them witches . . .” she giggles to herself maniacally).

And like in every smudgy coloured nightmare you’ve ever had, every situation she now finds herself in seems to have four brick walls and no door. But ‘poor’ Rosemary? Never! As the net closes in on her and the hour of birth draws near, she goes down fighting, screaming, distracting, running, door-locking and tranquiliser-dodging. She is dogged, now beyond fear.

"You look like a piece of chalk, Ro"

At the end, as she enters a room full of gleeful sherry-sipping Satanists, carving-knife in hand, to stake her rightful claim on her newborn son, she’s throwing down the gauntlet. Maternal feelings overcome ones of revulsion because Rosemary knows however bad his dad might be, he’s also as good as her at her best, too, isn’t he? (Isn't he?)

Carol White as Joy in Poor Cow (1967)

"A lady? Perhaps, I may be . . ."

White embodied the lot of the proletarian princesses of Swinging London. Predictably, she was thus saddled with epithets like “The Battersea Bardot” - hijacked by Oi band Cock Sparrer for their tribute to White - and “The Working-Class Julie Christie”, as if she was worthy only through comparison (imagine anyone calling Julie Christie “The Middle-Class Carol White”). For while the well-heeled SW3 sorority - Christie, Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, all so sunny and insouciant where White was forlorn and resigned - were free to indulge in Pilled-up sex as their Baby Boomer birthright and suffer little or no consequence or judgement, White’s girls only had to take the most tentative walk on the wild side before finding themselves up the duff, up the aisle or up shit creek PDQ. Joy will never cross the river to Chelsea – she’ll always be too busy putting her little cherub to sleep with the aid of milk and alcohol or washing the Battersea soot from her yellow hair with Lux flakes.

Joy & Son: room and bored

Joy is simple, straightforward and lonely, a bit of a drifter. Her husband is doing 12 years in Wandsworth and alone with her baby son, she hooks up with Terence Stamp’s ebony-haired, tender-but-bad boy. He’s in the same business as her jailbird spouse, and it’s a lifestyle she casually accepts – the stolen jewels he brings to a bleary-eyed Joy after a night-time robbery delight her in the most casual manner. Such are the material blessings that light up her existence. No matter how many shifts she spends getting varicose veins behind the local bar or how many shivery hours she spends ‘modelling’ in front of a sweaty lecher’s film-free camera, she’d only ever have the shillings for paste imitations.

A smashing bird under sooty skies

Now and then, she’s radiant with hope. Yet the forlorn look in her eyes – even when she’s smiling – always hints at some inevitably bleak and hopeless destiny. She always seems soft, whereas girls like Joy are often bruised early by experience, and it shows in their flinty faces. But Joy’s a romantic soul, too suffused with dreams of something better so that she floats above the rocks. She delights in sexual pleasure and is frank about it, telling her equally hard-up, more practical mate Beryl that “I couldn’t go professional – I enjoy it too much.”

Battersea Bardot

Her beauty is a casually worn one, forever on the verge of being slatternly: chignon always falling apart, badly-bleached hair in need of a root-job, mascara collecting sootily in the corners of her eyes. These looks are Joy’s only passport to a better life, and you just know they’re going to expire. It’s a fleeting, early-blooming beauty, one that will run to colourless, fat cheeks on a steady diet of white bread, too-sweet tea, gin & orange squash and John Player’s Specials. When Joy says to herself “Whoever heard of girls like me making it?” the pathos in her voice is heartrending – for this is barely an act; the thought has probably passed through her mind daily since she first realised she’d be looking out over weed-choked bombsites all her young life.

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniel in Klute (1971)

Fonda as Bree: a vision of urban alienation in shiny boots of leather

Klute is a favourite film of mine, the unjustly and bafflingly least known of Alan J. Pakula’s early 1970s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’. I love Klute as much for the stomach-tensing murk and menace of the setting and mood as for Fonda’s portrayal of this none-more-conflicted and unflashy prostitute being stalked by a psychotic ex-john.

A loner in the head-down urban jungle of noirish early seventies NYC, Bree is one of its many working girls – but none can match her for oddness. She’s not eccentric, just strange - and anomalous in every sphere of her life. You can tell by her accent, the books she reads, her methods of relaxation (a joint, a kaftan and a gospel standard) that she’s of middle-class extraction, probably a college graduate and that her family, if she has any, know nothing of her current life or the peril she’s in. 

She’s more solitary than social: we only seeing her letting loose when she goes on a three-day drug binge to forget the horror of her situation, dancing to high-octane psych-soul with Candy Darling. Even her threads set her apart from her fellow hookers (“Yeah. She used to dress the way you do” smirks Shirely Stoler’s madam as she looks over Bree’s East Village roll-neck and mod mop).

Humiliated at model castings (“She’s got funny hands”) and acting auditions (“Interesting accent – we’ll let you know”), the uncomfortable irony is that’s she only in control when she’s turning tricks: “For an hour, I’m the best fuck in the world”. No wonder she’s so neurotic and throws away half her earnings on shrink sessions.

"I guess this will amuse you . . . I'm - I'm afraid of the dark."

When she meets Donald Sutherland’s gauche, lonely private investigator, John Klute, she first snubs him as a “Goddamn hypocrite square”, then takes his virginity. In return, he gradually gives her love and understanding. And against her will she finds herself responding. They are both outcasts on opposite sides of the law, but equally, neither have a place in ‘respectable’ society. Still, there’s no danger of Klute threatening Bree’s independence; her succinct take on the normal life that marriage represents are an outsider classic: “Setting up home? Darning socks? I’d go mad.”

Klute and Bree: the start of something