What a Way to Go

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, things just don't work out. Sometimes, no matter how much money and starpower you put into a movie, it just doesn't turn out. Such is the trouble with What a Way to Go.

Shirley MacLaine is our lead, with Gene Kelly, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum AND Paul Newman as her leading men. Screenplay by Comden & Green, costumes by Edith Head, hair by Sydney Guilaroff, jewels by Harry Winston. Yet, somehow, What a Way to Go doesn't quite get there. It wants to be an outrageous, self-mocking comedy, but it's afraid to muss its hair or make any waves. So why watch it then? Well..

Edith Head's career contained many dazzling achievements, from Elizabeth Taylor in a A Place in the Sun to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard to Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. In What a Way to Go, Head was, well, given her head--and half a million dollars, which was some serious scratch back in 1964. Shirley MacLaine is attired in a series of fur hats, beaded gowns and marabou pajamas that would knock the most discerning eye out. If you lean back, put some Peggy Lee or Raveonettes on the stereo, pop open a bottle of bubbly and let the fashion show commence, What a Way to Go is far more enjoyable.

So, out opening introduces us to fabulously wealthy widow Shirley, who is trying to give her fortune away to the U.S. government. See, every one of her husbands has gotten rich and then died while she was married to them Since she actually loved her husbands, this is problematic and she thinks she's cursed. We are told the story in flashback as she tells it to a psychiatrist (part of the telling-it-to-your-shrink genre that was popular for a bit.)

Actually, this would be a great film for little girls with all the pink & sparkly & fancy.

Well, little girls who can find the humor in death, anyway.

We start with the young Shirley flouncing around the family home with drawn-on freckles and a giant lollipop. Her mother rants about the importance of "money success money success"--even for what's basically a 90-second role, they got Marx Brother foil Margaret Dumont. We immediately get the heavily parodic tone of the movie, but somehow it feels forced, not funny. Perhaps Frank Tashlin or a Billy Wilder could have gotten it right but, instead, one gets the feeling that What a Way to Go is waiting for a punchline that never comes, which is actually sort of is--it's a comedy with virtually no jokes, just a jokey tone. I mean, if you're already making a comedy predicated on multiple deaths, why are you playing everything else vanilla?

"You turned out real beautiful! You have something to sell!
Take a mother's advice and sell it now!"

(Yes, we're all told this is bad advice. But, frankly, as someone who's been there, I wish i'd sold it when i still looked like a damn Barbie doll. Prince Charming ain't coming, sweet cheeks, and it's better to wind up with something than nothing. If I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be this. So i'm telling you in case you can use it. Or, if find yourself back in time and run into me, pass on the message.)

Here we meet Dean Martin as the town rich asshole--Shirl's boyfriend, even though she hates him. We're supposed to hate Dean, but it's hard to hate Dean. We also get Dick Van Dyke as some kind of general store-owning, Thoreau-reading proto-hippie, who becomes Mr. MacLaine #1.

Her time as Van Dyke's bride is rendered as a silent movie with her as Mabel Normand and him as
Buster Keaton. This conceit of rendering each romance in a different style will continue--Paul Newman's New Wave art film, Robert Mitchum's big-budget epic, Gene Kelly's flashy musical--but it never quite lands. It may be because the film never quite abandon's its own 20th Century Fox production values to embrace those of the style it intends to inhabit.

So Dino insults Dick, so Dick decides to make his general store into Wal-Mart and run local scion Dean out of business. Doing so makes him rich, but deprives Shirley of his company and eventually he dies from counting his money too hard or something...

Sad Shirl arrives in Paris, where she meets boorish beatnik Paul Newman, who is weirdly like some kind of post-millennial hipster with his machines that paint and his being a dick to the locals and his beard. But Shirley is happy in her Parisian garret with her bullet bra and Paul Newman. Who wouldn't be?

(Few invoke as much of a universal "I'd hit that" as young Paul Newman. I still recall sitting in Lucy's bar on Avenue A sometime back in the 90s, watching The Long Hot Summer with my friend Denise and Lucy, the little Ukranian babushka who owned the place. When Paul first appeared shirtless and sweaty, Lucy poured us all a shot of whiskey and we drank to his hotness...)

Anyhow, What a Way to Go. So, Paul Newman become a famous painter (thus giving Edith Head reason to design Shirley some dope outfits that match his paintings and look great with her Anna Karina wig) but this means he has no time for his lady. We're supposed to be charmed by the fact that Shirley wants a man who spends his every waking minute with her but, frankly, it seems kind of clingy and needy... or maybe she's a nymphomaniac and needs a man who has no job but giving her some D every 20 minutes. Add in the fact that she seems to have no personality characteristic besides a love for pretty clothes and the need to latch onto a man (Hey, it's Jupiter Ascending!) and we have a lead character with no character. Which would be fine if it were obscured by a nonstop barrage of jokes, but it's not. Oh, believe me, it's not...

So, anyway, Newman buys it at the hands (brushes? rollers? poky sticks?) of one of his steampunk painting machines (see, told you he was a hipster) but sales of his paintings have left Shirley, once again, a rich widow....

The widow runs across the Millionaire Playboy, played by Robert Mitchum. As always, Mitchum is a welcome presence and he and MacLaine have a nice chemistry--probably because they had it in real life in the form of a multi-year affair... anyway. He's a fabulously wealthy captain of industry.

The "Lush Budgett Production" joke is funny the first or second time. By use #9 they've pretty much torn it and are you seriously telling me that, with all the drunken, bitter, overeducated screeenwriters in Hollywood, you could only come up with ONE pun on a movie mogul's name. Anyway, we do at least get the most magnificently glamorous costumes. Bow down to Edith Head!

 

So there's that and then there's Mitch and Shirley repeating "Remind me to tell you that I love you" a few dozen times. It is literally a 20-minute sequence that hangs on two jokes repeated over and over again. A large part of the problem with What a Way to Go is that it is one of the most lazily written films ever made--in scenes like this, you get the feeling that Betty Comden and Adolph Green didn't even finish it. The wit that made Singin' in the Rain and Auntie Mame is nowhere here apparent. But, still, the outfits...

Mitchum dies when they go back to the farm he grew up on--he's been fixated on the cow he had as a boy, Melissa, throughout the film. It makes you sorry they didn't include any if the many bestiality jokes Mitchum must've made off-camera. Especially since he dies trying to milk a bull...

Husband number next is Gene Kelly, a struggling hoofer. We get a nice dance number starring Kelly and MacLaine and then some more non-comedy as Kelly, of course, becomes rich and famous. Since his name is Pinky, he demands that everything be painted pink, which leads to some really great lewks, both is set and in costume, if nothing else (and there is pretty much nothing else)...

But, again, we have our lazy screenwriters who come up with no other joke other than "everything's pink!" Kelly becomes an unbearable stereotype of a narcissistic Hollywood star and comes off as an asshole, not a comedian. Maybe because he doesn't have any funny lines. Everything's pink! Geddit? He's a jerk! Geddit? Anyway, he dies too when his fans swamp him Day of the Locust style. So funny!

Which brings us back to the present, and you can guess whether Shirley decides to go with the psychiatrist, go back to a now-broke Dean Martin or strike out on her own to find her own purpose in life beyond obsessive devotion to a man. Well, I'm sure you can guess which one is not happening...

Apparently the first choice for the lead role in What a Way to Go was Marilyn Monroe and one cannot help but thinks she would have been better--MacLaine was a professional dancer and a skilled comedienne, but somehow she didn't have the aptitude for physical comedy nor the innocent deadpan that Monroe possessed. Few played the straight woman as well as she did and if What a Way to Go had let its male leads go to town with a sort of reverse Lorelei Lee at its center... that might have worked. Or Comden & Green could have just gotten off of their asses and written some jokes.

Still, the costumes--72 of them, if you're counting--are to die for. If you own a hair salon or boutique or a bar that does brisk sales in rosé, you should consider putting What a Way to Go on your screens just for the visuals. Just be sure and turn the sound off. No one wants to hear that "remind me to tell you that I love you" joke again....

Pia Zadora

"And that year, I was often mentioned in the same sentence as Meryl Streep. People would say, ‘That Pia Zadora, she’s no Meryl Streep.’"

I interviewed the charming and hilarious Pia Zadora for Vegas Seven.

Spirits of the Dead

You want some serious Euro filmic decadence from the birth of the sexual revolution? Step right this way to a period piece that adapts short stories you may have read in high school...

Spirits of the Dead adapts three tales from Edgar Allan Poe and was part of the trend for anthology films than ran from the mid-60s to mid-70s, which included such highlights as Torture Garden, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (which is actually a train) and Tales of Terror (which also took Poe as its an inspiration and had Vincent Price to boot). In Spirits of the Dead, Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini each adapted a short story--the title is taken from a poem. It should surprise no one that that the last contribution is the best, but each of the others has something to recommend them as well.

Opening the film is "Metzengerstein," the offering from Roger Vadim which, like pretty much any Vadim film, is a showcase for the hot blonde he was banging at the time, in this case Jane Fonda.

As decadent aristocrat the Countess Frederica, Jane looks absolutely gorgeous in an array of costumes that combine thigh boots and bared navels with slashed sleeves and ruffled collars. (I swear that John Galliano must absolutely adore this film. Whether he knows it or not.) Not to mention the hair. The hair is to die for. RuPaul and Dolly Parton would tussle over that hair... courtesy of ace Eurostylist of the 60s Carita, BTW.

Of course, all this flash--Wine! Orgies! Daggers! Corsets! Baby leopards!--doesn't conceal that pretty much nothing happens in "Metzengerstein." We watch Fonda stomp around in her outfits like Beyonce until she runs across Baron Wilhelm..

Baron Wilhelm is played by Jane's brother Peter--in the story they're supposed to be cousins, but apparently that wasn't incestuous enough for the French. He barely speaks, which is supposed to be because he's even moodier than Jane is, but I'm pretty sure it's actually because his French sucks (remember that Peter spent his teen years getting high; Jane spent hers going to Vassar and working at Paris Review).

 The showgirl headdress existed even in Medieval times...

Anyway, Jane gets pissed, sets Peter's stables on fire, Peter dies, a big black horse shows up in her tapestry and in her stables, then more shit catches on fire, etc. etc. etc...

"William Wilson" is the entry by Louis Malle, a variation on the Doppleganger story--except in this version, it's a good double that keeps thwarting the evil original. Wilson is played by Alain Delon, who projects just the right level of icily dispassionate cruelty, qualities the real Delon, a notorious asshole, apparently possessed in spades.

 

We watch William Wilson torment both his teachers and classmates, even as a child--or, should we say, attempt to, because it seems that another, identical boy named William Wilson constantly shows up to put a stop to his efforts at sadism, whether its pulling a bullied classmate out of a barrel full of rats or calling a halt to an "autopsy" on a live girl.

 

Out of the three stories, Malle comes the closest to giving the people what they (allegedly) want--creepy rats, icky autopsies, bare boobs, titillating flogging scenes--though the idea that the supposedly monstrous "other" is actually a force for good throw it off-balance a bit.. Actually, Spirits of the Dead does not have that much horror in it--there's a sort of ghost/possession in the first story and the double in the second one but the third if just sort of hallucinatory,  which we will get to in a moment...

The theoretical climax of "William Wilson" comes with Brigitte Bardot in a black wig smoking a cigar--Brigitte is great at what she does, but she's one of the last people i'd ever cast as an ersatz Lola Montez. (Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was born for to play Lola and it's amazing no one ever had her do it--imagine how much better the Ophuls Lola Montez would be with her rather than that pretty waxwork, Martine Carol. But i digress..)

Anyway, Bardot throws shade on Delon and beats him at cards, then suddenly he starts winning and winds up, quite literally winning her. He whips Brunette Brigitte, then is about to have his buddies gang bang her, when the good William Wilson shows up and reveals that bad William Wilson fucking cheated. That Wilson bullies, tortures, rapes--but suffers no real comeuppance until he cheats his cronies at cards is still appropriate to today...

Our last and most impressive entry is Fellini's "Toby Dammit," ostensibly based on Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," but only in the most tenuous fashion.

From the opening airport pan--a mass of shifting color tints, distorted soundscapes, leering faces and cardboard cutouts (no, literally, cardboard cutouts)--we know we're in Fellini territory. If 8 1/2 is the tale of the director's meltdown and La Dolce Vita is the writer's, "Toby Dammit" is the actor. with the identity crisis turning out that much worse. (If "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson" are the Poe surly teen goths read, "Toby Dammit" is the actual Poe reeling around Baltimore drunk, deranged and dying. Fonda and Delon play sadistic assholes, Stamp is a troubled artist.)

We get herds of nuns, flashbulb-ing paparazzi, traffic jams, all reeled out as character-packed mod-Bosch canvases under Inferno-red skies. Toby is in town to make a western retelling of the story of Christ, for which he will we receive a Ferrari, more specifically a golden Ferrari 330 LMB. (What would Jesus drive?)

Stamp staggers through a purgatorial television talk show, distracted by multiple cameras and multiple hosts,alternately morose and grandiose, playing it up to the hilt for a disapproving and fascinated audience.

The awards banquet is your standard Fellini party scene with Toby in full tailspin. He attains an odd moment of lucidity reciting a monologue from Macbeth onstage, giving a glimpse of the talent he's droned in drink and drugs (there's more than a dash of The Richard Burton Story here.)

 

Finally, Toby gets his sweet sportscar and we're off! He whizzes to the outskirts of the city to a small town. The joy of speed gives way to the realization that he's lost and cannot find his way back. (It kind of reminds me of them time i got lost in Detroit somewhere between Hamtramck and downtown, just turning endlessly along unlit, overgrown roads, hoping I didn't run out of gas before sundown. Then I found a little bulletproof-glassed minimart in the middle of nowhere and a bunch of really nice guys gave me directions back.)

 

Toby keeps driving in that beautiful Ferrari, a one-man car chase, speeding along until a succession of dead ends, turnarounds, roundabouts and plazas repeatedly bring him to a halt. The town has somehow folded in on him and, no matter where he turns, he can't seem to get out. And the cardboard cutouts are closing in again...

... and it falls down and goes boom...

Spirits of the Dead isn't quite a horror film, though it does have a few cringe-inducing moments and the Fellini installment is creepy in its own peculiar way. But for atmosphere and style, it's a movie that's hard to beat.