The Talkies/Against All Bods

...As I recall, I sat there thinking, when did life get to be so complicated...

...If athletes need only understand the rules, not each other, then Hollywood and the Los Angeles Organizing Committee may very well converge...

...In the film noir, physical attraction and lovemaking were background--it was the psychological give-and-take that got dramatized...

...Without any moral impediment, the seduction has to be made fatal by other, more literal means...

...It comes as readily off the tongue as the tennis at Wimbledon, the racing at Churchill Downs, the sailing at Newport, the riding to hounds...

...I look forward to the logical extension of this trend--when the classic ideal of physical culture meets up with our highly advanced view of sex as a muscle-straining performance standing in for the now-defunct mental debate between the sexes...

...When Terry finally confronts Jessie back in L.A., they are both so busy clawing at each other's clothing they don't have time to discuss the life-and-death situation they are in...

...Men and women unable to carry on a conversation, much less marry one another, will seek a new understanding through public displays of erotic prowess...

...Crazed, naked egos willing to kill for a trivial victory--it rings true, although ! must say the deck was stacked...

...Then the bullets fly, and so does Jessie, only to reappear back in Los Angeles reunited with Jake...

...In Officer, the young Navy pilots and their girls are just as precipitous about getting into bed, but the film has an admirable distance on the drawbacks of such haste, as both couples climb back out having to face the task of getting to know each other...

...This film's imagination of evil, of how human beings are corrupted, and to what purpose, is straight out of the J.R...

...Los Angeles can be cold and hard and mean...

...Here it's the other way around...

...Wyler trying to hire the same football player, Terry Brogan (Jeff Bridges), to go hunt for her...

...As the movie starts, Jessie has had enough of Jake, too, and runs away to Mexico, leaving both Jake and Mrs...

...QUAFFING IN MASSACHUSETTS The presence o f millions upon millions of college and graduate-school students sets the tone of the drinking in Massachusetts, and it is a rare man who can drink there and leave with a shred of dignity intact...

...For one thing, there are too many pink cheeks around...

...Tall Boy Carling Black Labels--certainly a sign of desperate men...

...Think about it...

...He used to be a butterball...

...This, I gather, is what the ads and reviewers mean by "steamy"--straining muscles, gleaming perspiration, and bulging veins in place of the subtleties of mental conquest and submission...

...The next thing I know I am sitting in one of the 1,700 places called "College Inn" across the state, at a table filled with suspicious coeds ~. I vaguely remember the place having green all-weather carpeting, garden furniture, lighting more suited to a store selling Scott's Turf-Builder, and a leering bartender who dispensed dusty bottles of Bud...

...Capitalism is the enemy, as the sicko bad guy, Jake Wise (played by James Woods) turns out to be not sicko so much as hopelessly in thrall to Big Money in the form of a real estate developer and owner of a football team, Mrs...

...For another, too many brows unmarred by rejection and worry, grinding and scrambling, hesitancy and inadequacy...

...Hackford a disservice...

...For another, too many perfect smiles over white turtlenecks set off by midwinter tans...

...She is simply afraid, of Jake and of her powerful mother...

...And why shouldn't they...

...There is simply no developed interaction, for good or ill, between Terry and Jessie...

...Hollywood has helped to liberate us from that noti0n--and goodness knows, we are grateful...

...The "party" at Wellesley turns out to be seven demure lasses living in a large, powerful house straight out of Town & Country who want to have a cookout...

...Wyler's beautiful daughter Jessie (Rachel Ward) has rebelled against her cold, hard, mean socialite mother by getting involved with the equally cold, hard, mean but socially unacceptable Jake Wise...

...Usually the plots revolve around a corrupted woman, the evil fellow who corrupted her, and the innocent hero whom she in turn corrupts...

...now he's a lifeguard with the face of a butterball...

...Isn't this a pretty fair account of the sexual ideal held up in much of today's entertainment...

...It is 13 degrees, and the ice-encrusted swimming pool beckons mightily...

...I mean, really...

...I leave it to the reader to name and classify the events...

...Well, that's a question this movie has trouble answering...

...just give me credit for having seen it coming, when one fine day you turn on your telescreen and watch the magnificently endowed competitors parade out onto the stadium-sized,mattresses, ready to'begin the All-Gender Division of the 1996 Olympic Sex Games...

...Off Terry goes, with a few snapshots and words of Spanish, to fifid Jessie on a picturesque Mexican island where she lives the simple life in an immaculate white linen smock and a hundred-dolla~t haircut...

...old-fashioned visual blackness, claiming to have found a sunshiny equivalent...

...Wyler, whose ruthless policies have recently caused him to be cut unceremoniously from her football by Martha Bayles team, Terry opts for Jake's offer, even though Jake is a creepy nightclub owner whose sleaze is barely covered by his slick...

...Created largely by German e'rnigrds during the forties, Hollywood film noir is noir in two senses: The nighttime settings are black, and so is the vision of human nature...

...But Taylor Hackford's 1982 hit, An officer and a Gentleman, dealt so well with the subject that I expected better...

...If this betrayal is supposed to substitute for the calculating wickedness of the classic film noir heroine, then we really have come a 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 long way, baby...

...Let's see how many of those couples are still together in ten years...

...doggies...

...The second night you're talking philosophy, but find the conversation peppered with inexplicable references to deck shoes and waterfowlembellished canvas-web belts...

...Hackford has dispensed with the Martha Bayles is film critic for The American Spectator...

...The drinking in Massachusetts is, for the most part, like the New Women in Manhattan: shallow, insincere, and prone to hysteria...

...You really do...

...Bitter toward Mrs...

...It's all sweetness and light with them now," said Reed over the justly famed double cheeseburgers at Charley's Kitchen, near Harvard Square, nodding toward a loud table of preps and prepettes...

...But the m o v i e s . . , somehow the seduction movies aren't quite as suspenseful when the half-coital billboard outside advertises the fact that the stars will be getting it on in the first twenty minutes or your $4.50 back...

...I suppose he accomplishes something like that in the beginning, when the two male leads race their sportscars along Sunset Boulevard...

...Ewing school...

...Instead of a slow, complex battle of wills between hero and siren, in which he throws away his integrity as she lures him step by step into her coils, we have a lot of photogenic, sweaty sex in a couple of photogenic Mexican settings--no hassle, until Jake and the cold, hard, mean capitalists track the lovers down...

...Shenton, and loudly correcting someone else's French...

...Naturally, she is irresistible, and the love affair begins before Terry can even down his tequila...

...and the only conflict between her and Terry is that he tries harder than she does not to be their pawn...

...I had just come out of a 14-hour hangover proving the truth of Franklin's saw, he who drinks fast pays slow, and was gasping like a fish THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 31...

...The drinking in Massachusetts...

...The only thing we can be sure of here is that she has parts...

...Beyond this, however, the colorful and luxurious settings combined with the presumed darkness of character and motivation remind me of nothing so much as the prime-time TV soap operas--"Dallas," "Dynasty," and the rest...

...Now, lust was definitely the theme in the old film noir, but the attitude toward it was different...

...The obligatory duet on piano-organ and dulcimer, named "Tapestry," wailed away in the corner...

...Jeff Bridges seems to have prepared for the role by building up a newly muscled physique...

...It is simply there, an automatically assumed fact of life, no plot development required...

...Wyler (Jane Greer, the original femme fatale in Out of the Past), and her silver-haired, blackhearted attorney (Richard Widmark...

...After all, the Olympics are coming, with the venerable ideal of physical competition between peoples of different nations, languages, and political ideologies...

...By the third night, you are dredging up anecdotes about the American History seminar with Prof...

...Yet, as in Moscow, Lake Placid, and Sarajevo, there is this bodily common ground...

...It is all a bit jarring...

...You look great," my friend offered...

...Here's the plot: Mrs...

...Perhaps by witnessing a contest between the finest representatives of either side, we can begin again to grope toward mutual respect...

...Back in the 1940s there was still the quaint notion floating around that sexual immorality was related to other forms of wrongdoing--that carnal indulgence with a stranger might be the first step toward losing one's social reputation, one's moral judgment, and the possession Of one's soul...

...There's so little conflict between the lovers because there's so little relationship, except of course the interrupted sensual one...

...One cannot properly drink there in gloom and despair, sit with the Churchillian black dog and tensely try to put to flight the demons...

...never yet have I seen Sunset Boulevard with so little traffic to dodge...

...Presumably, the glory of the Games is that despite our mental disagreements we are all bodily the same, able to share at least that much common ground...

...After the correct amount of gasoline is consumed, six guys in their by Joe Mysak boxer shorts stand in a snowbank incinerating weenies on a gas grill...

...The first night out, you're still raging in biliousness or roaring about sports...

...The best I could come up with in all my tours of duty in the state was a kind of paralyzing wistfulness, which set in shortly after reality broke like a flare over the dark and scarred romantic battlefield one night, suddenly illuminating my futile pursuit of a fairy princess...

...On second thought, I might be doing Mr...

...As for Rachel Ward, she is a marvelous specimen who might even be able to act, if she had a part...

...Jesse couldn't calculate her way out of a clothing boutique, much less deliberately entrap an unwilling hero...

...Nor is tllere any explaining the 80-mile drive through the interior to see the only girl at Mt...

...Hollywood seems quite convinced that communication is no longer possible between men and women--so the reason for distrust no longer needs to be explained, dramatized, or examined...

...We begin the night with eight or nine 16-oz...

...Having recently arrived in L.A., I was intrigued by his stated ambition "to do an unsentimental portrait of the c i t y . . , to shoot the city as a clear, piercing reality...

...Putting them down with collegians grown belligerent on the night air is not civilized drinking...

...Since one couple succeeds and the other tragically fails, the point is well made that fast sex does not lead to fast trust, understanding, or evendestructive manipulation...

...Perhaps his film does say something about Los Angeles, or about a certain aspect of Los Angeles...

...What else is there for them to do...

...How does one explain, for example, the party at Wellesley...

...And it is as freighted with meaning...

...Holyoke who voted for Reagan...

...The drinking in Massachusetts, as Barrister Reed would note later that evening, is not for wise men or sad Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...

...All these things take time, because they occur between human beings, not bodies...

...I realize, of course, that we can't ask a contemporary film to postpone gratification--I'm sure that would be very harmful to all of us...

...Nevertheless, it is not without a certain entertainment value...

...The battle of wills has become a physical display...