The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" Movies about women are becoming like what movies about blacks were a few years ago. As soon as they are made, they are guaranteed an audience and at least a few sympathetic reviews. We are living in...
...She also is clearly an independent creature, not a slave to stereotypes or mindless revolt...
...We are living in the era of women...
...At the other extreme of fictitious, overworked, cliched garbage that, with every possible chance, misses the mark of even a glimmer of reality, is the box office sensation Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore...
...It is fascinating watching from start to finish...
...Seeing it is Just like dropping a quarter down a grating on the sidewalk...
...For the hulking, sagging, wrinkled Ms...
...Susskind, have you not a shred of dignity...
...When we see Janis Joplin singing in California, in Canada, in Germany, we are seeing all of Janis Joplin, because she put all she had into her singing...
...But when the cameras follow her to her tenth high school reunion, we see that she is extremely ill at ease and obviously somewhat abashed and in awe of the punks who made fun of her ten years before...
...As trite as it sounds, as incredible as it was in the late 1960s, she sang from her heart...
...Her songs told a lot about the way she felt...
...But Alice is not about women or about men...
...Her answer was a classic explanation of why people like to be famous, rich, and powerful: "They laughed me out of class...
...She didn't have no man, and she sang the blues, but she made her own life...
...Alice, played by Ellen Burstyn as if she were jacked over the moon on speed, is supposed to be thirty-five...
...It was, as people used to say, "all up front...
...But she comes across as a real live person, not a media creation...
...Now I'm going back there...
...Luckily for everyone, the hubby dies in a truck crash, and the wife and kid are free to find their dream...
...We all know Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose...
...That's exploitation...
...It is frustrating, but it teaches you to be careful...
...Does anyone honestly believe that there are more sensitive women married to loutish men than vice versa...
...The makers of the film also level with us...
...Alice and the kid pick up and leave their home town...
...In God's name, Mr...
...Right or the grim reaper...
...Even that was pushing it...
...She loved being famous, but she still hurt...
...In Alice's case, the dream is to be a singer in a nightclub...
...She had sincerely suffered and paid her dues, and she had a good time by telling people about her bad times—in huge auditoriums for $30,000 a night...
...Of course, as it happens, to no one's surprise, some of the movies are nothing more than slightly revised versions of Back Street or Stella Dallas...
...Janis did not give out a false note in either talk or song...
...Alice's husband hates their son, a pathetically abused kid who will surelygrow into a mass murderer...
...When she was on Dick Cavett's erstwhile TV show, heasked her how she felt about her high school classmates from Port Arthur, Texas...
...Alice is a whimpering, pathetic excuse for -a movie about women's rights, although it has somehow got the reputation as the "chic" women's picture of the spring...
...We can see from the movie the strain she was under, and no underlining is necessary...
...Men and women can be happy or unhappy married to people who are different from them or the same: Must we always see pathetic women and thug-like men...
...She was asked in an interview what young people wanted...
...But we don't always get to see it in quite so unvarnished a way...
...But now there is a new genre of movies about women which are not "women's movies...
...But to be sure that we see that Janis' singing really is her, we are also shown some interviews with her...
...Right, played by Kris Kristofferson, who is supposed to be her age, but looks like her son...
...This is International Women's Year and Hollywood is simply pouring out movies about women, their oppression, their liberation, their solidarity...
...Of course, she leaves her son alone all day and night in a hotel room, but what the hell, she's got to be free...
...And if someone says, "That's right...
...It is about exploitation—of audiences by filmmakers, of cliches for profit, of women's anger and self-doubt...
...She was not a calculating, artificial creation of public relations people—like Alice Cooper or David Bowie...
...how anyone can keep breathing life into that chestnut is a mystery...
...Through the limited media of interviews and songs, we are given a portrait of a real, struggling person who levels with us...
...It is a documentary about the late, great Janis Joplin...
...The Surgeon General should require a warning notice that this movie is "A David Susskind Production," and that should be enough to scare off viewers, but instead they are coming in droves...
...Alice is supposed to be a thirty-five-year-old swan of a woman, sensitive, intelligent, artistic, long-suffering, married to a brutish Coca Cola driver who doesn't even thank her for cooking his favorite dish...
...To show that a woman married to a pig is unhappy is insulting to everyone...
...Alice is the quintessential example of Back Street brought up to date...
...The movies were stereotyped, with brutish men and saintly women, double standards of all kinds, and guaranteed extraction of tears because of the woman's nobility in adversity and her sweetness in triumph...
...She, in fact, can't do anything without a man...
...It is the story of a woman who was also a person...
...There has always been a large market for what have long been called "women's movies," weepy melodramas of a woman's enslavement to Mr...
...A few years ago, in The Last Picture Show, this same actress played a woman who was supposed to be in her forties or fifties...
...And it is clear that she was a bitter, hurt woman, trying to recoup some of the lost affection she missed as a child...
...Burstyn to be playing someone of thirty-five is grotesque...
...they laughed me out of town...
...Wrong and her eventual salvation, after many trials and humiliations, by either Mr...
...And she wanted to be a singer...
...She leaves and goes to Tucson where she gets a job as—now all you people watching this in the Sutton Theatre on the East Side of New York will really empathize with this—a waitress...
...Some people consider her the greatest white blues singer of all time...
...They come to some town in the Southwest where Alice incredibly—she can neither look good nor sing—gets a job in a bar as a chanteuse...
...The best one so far is Janis, subtitled, The Way It Was...
...She was a young person and she obviously had the same goals, and she achieved both by singing the blues...
...Just like in the old weepers, she realizes her life's ambitions through a man, just as her life's ambitions were thwarted by a man before...
...Janis Joplin was a great blues singer...
...That may be true of all performers, and maybe of all people...
...The movie is made of interviews with her when she was at her peak, and long stretches of film of her concerts...
...they laughed me out of school...
...She answered after a moment of thought: "To have a good time and to be sincere...
...Can't we occasionally see something other than this pre-Christian relic of a cliche...
...Alice is also boring, poorly directed, acted with embarrassing amateurishness, and neither funny nor sad...
...The point is made—she suffered and she triumphed and ultimately she failed...
...Also of course, she gets involved with a lunatic man who, of course, seduces her and then threatens to kill her, of course...
...Somehow she escapes the firing squad she deserves for her neglect of her son, and meets up with Mr...
...Fame can do a lot, but it can't do everything...
...That's the system," then what about Janis...
...Any man who wanted to be a singer could just be a singer...
...There is not a word of editorializing, no hokey photographs of her funeral, no pictures of her tombstone...
Vol. 8 • May 1975 • No. 8
