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 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...
...She was a young person and she obviously had the same goals, and she achieved both by singing the blues...
...Some people consider her the greatest white blues singer of all time...
...That may be true of all performers, and maybe of all people...
...Does anyone honestly believe that there are more sensitive women married to loutish men than vice versa...
...But Alice is not about women or about men...
...The point is made—she suffered and she triumphed and ultimately she failed...
...It is about exploitation—of audiences by filmmakers, of cliches for profit, of women's anger and self-doubt...
...Any man who wanted to be a singer could just be a singer...
...As trite as it sounds, as incredible as it was in the late 1960s, she sang from her heart...
...Even that was pushing it...
...And she wanted to be a singer...
...For the hulking, sagging, wrinkled Ms...
...We all know Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose...
...Alice is also boring, poorly directed, acted with embarrassing amateurishness, and neither funny nor sad...
...Also of course, she gets involved with a lunatic man who, of course, seduces her and then threatens to kill her, of course...
...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...
...That's exploitation...
...Through the limited media of interviews and songs, we are given a portrait of a real, struggling person who levels with us...
...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...
...Fame can do a lot, but it can't do everything...
...She also is clearly an independent creature, not a slave to stereotypes or mindless revolt...
...Susskind, have you not a shred of dignity...
...And if someone says, "That's right...
...The best one so far is Janis, subtitled, The Way It Was...
...Luckily for everyone, the hubby dies in a truck crash, and the wife and kid are free to find their dream...
...We can see from the movie the strain she was under, and no underlining is necessary...
...She was not a calculating, artificial creation of public relations people—like Alice Cooper or David Bowie...
...The movie is made of interviews with her when she was at her peak, and long stretches of film of her concerts...
...That's the system," then what about Janis...
...Her answer was a classic explanation of why people like to be famous, rich, and powerful: "They laughed me out of class...
...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...
...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...
...It is a documentary about the late, great Janis Joplin...
...Wrong and her eventual salvation, after many trials and humiliations, by either Mr...
...But now there is a new genre of movies about women which are not "women's movies...
...Burstyn to be playing someone of thirty-five is grotesque...
...To show that a woman married to a pig is unhappy is insulting to everyone...
...Right or the grim reaper...
...Her songs told a lot about the way she felt...
...But she comes across as a real live person, not a media creation...
...Somehow she escapes the firing squad she deserves for her neglect of her son, and meets up with Mr...
...how anyone can keep breathing life into that chestnut is a mystery...
...There is not a word of editorializing, no hokey photographs of her funeral, no pictures of her tombstone...
...When she was on Dick Cavett's erstwhile TV show, heasked her how she felt about her high school classmates from Port Arthur, Texas...
...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...
...She didn't have no man, and she sang the blues, but she made her own life...
...It is fascinating watching from start to finish...
...In God's name, Mr...
...Alice, played by Ellen Burstyn as if she were jacked over the moon on speed, is supposed to be thirty-five...
...Right, played by Kris Kristofferson, who is supposed to be her age, but looks like her son...
...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...
...Now I'm going back there...
...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...
...Can't we occasionally see something other than this pre-Christian relic of a cliche...
...Janis Joplin was a great blues singer...
...It is frustrating, but it teaches you to be careful...
...Seeing it is Just like dropping a quarter down a grating on the sidewalk...
...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...
...The makers of the film also level with us...
...they laughed me out of town...
...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...
...In Alice's case, the dream is to be a singer in a nightclub...
...But we don't always get to see it in quite so unvarnished a way...
...It was, as people used to say, "all up front...
...But to be sure that we see that Janis' singing really is her, we are also shown some interviews with her...
...they laughed me out of school...
...She, in fact, can't do anything without a man...
...And it is clear that she was a bitter, hurt woman, trying to recoup some of the lost affection she missed as a child...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It is the story of a woman who was also a person...
...She loved being famous, but she still hurt...
...Alice and the kid pick up and leave their home town...
...This is International Women's Year and Hollywood is simply pouring out movies about women, their oppression, their liberation, their solidarity...
...We are living in the era of women...
...She answered after a moment of thought: "To have a good time and to be sincere...
...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...
...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...
...Alice is the quintessential example of Back Street brought up to date...
...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...
...She was asked in an interview what young people wanted...
Vol. 8 • May 1975 • No. 8
