Glenn Jordan | The Eccentricities of a Nightingale / 1976 [TV movie]

the making of blanche dubois

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams (screenplay, based on his rewrite of Summer and Smoke), Glenn Jordan (director) The Eccentricities of a Nightingale / 1976 [TV movie]

 

The other day I watched a filmed version of a production of Williams’ little-known play (based on a production at either the Louisville Actor’s Theatre or the Old Globe in San Diego—both are named at different sites). The Eccentricities is a rewrite of his Summer and Smoke, but the characters behave quite differently than they do in the former play and the tone is completely different, as Williams himself noted, far less melodramatic and certainly less symbolic that Summer and Smoke, first performed a year after his great A Streetcar Named Desire.

     One recognizes immediately, in fact, this play’s close relationship with Streetcar, whose central character, Alma Winemiller (Blythe Danner), shares many similarities with Blanche Dubois, and perhaps gives us a glimpse of some of the forces behind the over-the-top figure of Williams’ earlier play (Summer and Smoke, in earlier versions, however, predated A Streetcar).

     Alma, the daughter of the Glorious Hill, Mississippi Episcopalian minister, is a fragile being, as we recognize from the very first scene where she is frightened over and over by the fireworks going off around her on the 4th of July. She has also been performing, singing, and, particularly since—as everyone observes and she herself admits—she feels the songs so strongly, she describes herself as being overwrought. Also, she perceives her next-door neighbor, John Buchanan, Jr. (Frank Langella)—a young doctor who has been away to school at Johns Hopkins University—has temporarily returned home and, between long conversations with his mother and others, stares at her as she sits with her father (Tim O’Connor) and mother (Louise Latham) in the square. The mother, who we soon discover, is insane, is quickly whisked away, as she is throughout much of the play, Buchanan coming over to speak with Alma. But he too is soon taken off by his mother (Neva Patterson), who insists that he pay a doctorly visit to a patient that his father is too tired to attend to. Thus, Williams immediately sets up the situation: Alma is clearly aflutter in the presence of Buchanan, and Buchanan is obviously dominated and controlled by his mother.

     What is also apparent is that the still beautiful but virginal Alma is—in a word the play itself uses to describe her—almost hysterical, using any reason to swallow down the small white pills the doctor has prescribed for her (probably just placebos). Her father, in fact, attempts, to have a heart-to-heart talk with her in the very next scene, now Christmas, about her fluttering hands, her exaggerated gestures and speech, and—the most comical of accusations—her penchant for feeding birds in the town square. She is getting the reputation of an “eccentric.” Despite her father’s stern warnings, however, Alma stands up for her own behavior quite strongly, and we realize that despite the tensions of her home life, she has attempted to play role of a supporting daughter quite ably. Yet she is hurt, feels shunned by the local community, particularly when local carolers visit the Buchanan house but turn away from the Winemiller home. Alma seeks solace in a small gathering of town would-be intellectuals, odd people who mostly have inflated egos, confusing Blake with Rimbaud, and writing endlessly long verse plays. Only Alma, of the group, seems to know anything about poetry or literature.

     She invites Buchanan—who has again returned for a stay in Glorious Hill—to the gathering which ends in unpleasant bickering among the group and, once more, the young doctor is led off by his mother, who has a very different view of whom her beloved son will marry.

     The scene with the two of them, mother and son, in the Buchanan home is as close to love scene as the young doctor ever gets. Mrs. Buchanan clearly is the smothering type, who continues to control his life. Yet despite his mother’s interference, he has managed to make a date with Alma, whom he admires for her intelligence and the exciting flashes of change that run across her face. Her very eccentricities, he observes, are what makes her so special, so different from all the other women he has met and certainly sets her apart from any woman his might wish him to marry.

     Langella plays this scene, as well as others, with a kind of gentle passivity that almost angered me: why doesn’t he speak out, speak up for what he sees in Alma? Why can’t he show some anger at his mother’s bourgeois visions for his future life? Instead, he merely answers with quiet irony and, we later perceive, coded phrases that make him appear detached.

     Alma is fearful when evening arrives for their date that he won’t show, and when he does, she is almost overwhelmed with a kind of energized force, telling him after the movie of her life-long love for him. She even suggests that they go someplace for sex, to which he demurs. Alma admits that she does not expect this friendship to any further, but if she only she might have one night, a whole evening to remember… Again he refuses, but finally agrees to take her to a hotel that specializes in just such encounters. Once there, however, it becomes apparent that nothing will happen. What doesn’t get said is quite obvious: the young doctor is gay, disinterested in sex with a woman. Alma perceives the situation immediately. And in the last scene of the play, described as an epilogue, we see her seated on the same park bench where she sat early in the play. She has aged. When she encounters a young salesman, she begins a conversation, suggesting that they visit the same hotel. Apparently, she has now found regular companions for the one-night encounters she had sought out.

     This might almost be a reincarnation or glimpse of an earlier Blanche Dubois, the young woman of entitlement, given to romantic notions of the world, but also desirous of the pleasures of sex. Like Blanche, her first love turns out to be a homosexual, unable to give her what she desires. Alma has already begun on the long downward spiral where Blanche ends, in the arms of a teenage boy in a similar seedy hotel.

    Danner’s performance as Alma is splendid, and her stunning portrayal of Williams’ “eccentric nightingale” brings this play to life in a way that Summer and Smoke, with its smoldering old maid at the center, never achieves. I might even go so far, after watching this excellent TV production, as to suggest that Eccentricities of a Nightingale is one of Williams’ best works.

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2012).

  

Burt Brinckerhoff | Steambath / 1973 [PBS TV broadcast]

the confession

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce Jay Friedman (teleplay, based on his stage play), Burt Brinckerhoff (director) Steambath / 1973 [PBS TV broadcast]

 

With the recent death of novelist and playwright Bruce Jay Friedman, I determined to watch his 1971 play Steambath. The version I saw was the 1973 PBS production, broadcast in the day on only 41 outlets. Since then, the play has been revived numerous times.

    If the play was originally filled with obscenities, uttered mostly by God, in this case a Puerto Rican who cleans and cares for a steambath; in the television version many of these works were excised, the play tamed down a bit—although still showing a woman, Meredith calmly strolling into this men’s den to take a shower, and the two gay men of this work who do a kind of strip-tease to “Let Me Entertain You.”

      In this production Bill Bixby plays the central figure Tandy, and Valerie Perrine the bubbleheaded Meredith—whose major activities include shopping at Bloomingdale’s, getting a new hairdo, and paying her Bloomingdale’s bill.

      Tandy, on the other hand, has just begun what he describes as a new life. Having divorced his sexually promiscuous wife, he has found a new very calm—perhaps too calm—partner, has begun a book on Charlemagne, and finally connected with his daughter on a trip with her to Las Vegas.

      In the early scenes he and Meredith are just a little confounded in how they have come to be in the steambath with such bizarre figures, an older man who seems to have experienced everything in life, including erotic adventures and a good thorough sweat; an unclean man who expectorates and eats oranges, spitting out the pits on the floor, and who watches television loudly; as well as the two gay men who we later learn hung themselves over their love of a handsome dancer in  Zorba, the kind of flippant assessment of gay life we find constantly in cinema and in theater before the 1990s.

     At first, however, Tandy and Meredith do not perceive that they are dead, until speaking with one another they realize that they had simply been going about their daily lives, Tandy eating at a Chinese restaurant and Meredith, as always, shopping when they both suddenly themselves in the steambath, and in recounting that realize, as strange as it seems, they must be dead. Friedman has recounted the fact he had a “bad experience with food at a Chinese restaurant” that had led him to contemplate mortality.

       Tandy and Meredith both refuse their deaths, Tandy demanding to see the person in charge. The old codger says there is someone who, from time to time, enters the steam room to gather up the towels and wash down the surfaces.

      When he finally does show up, he is a foul-mouth Puerto Rican who, with the help of a machine, orders terrible deaths and a few good deeds in succession. When the Puerto Rican (José Perez) describes himself as God, Tandy refuses to believe it, locked in his bigotries and incapability of imagining God as a kind of janitor (“I find it relaxing,” he insists, given all his other duties).But Tandy will not believe. You cannot be God, he insists.

    To prove his godhead, the Puerto Rican does stage-bound card tricks, and pulls a large group of colored scarves from his pants, Tandy taunting him for his mere magician’s tricks.

     Bit by bit, however, the Puerto Rican goes further and further to counter Tandy’s taunts, eventually drinking a six-foot high glass of alcohol in a few sips, and, finally, serving up a kind of multi-media mural of glorification, to which all kneel, even if Tandy only bends one knee.

     Yet even this non-believer is somewhat overcome with awe, and has to admit the possibility that the Puerto Rican is something more than his surface projection.

      Soon after, another man joins their group, projecting the daily stock market results upon the wall. As he laments, he has bet only on sure and safe stock instead of chancy ones. Yet his have all gone down, while the chancy ones have continued rise. He too must have been a suicide.

      God finally orders all of them to enter the door which will take them to the void—which they one by one enter. All except Tandy who tries again to argue his way out of death, explaining his divorce, his new writing and companion, and closer relationship with his daughter.

        A new group is about to enter.

       Yet strangely, without God saying anything, he seems to hear an invisible dialogue, slowly realizing that his new girlfriend is absolutely boring, that the book he is writing is a trivial work on something he knows little about (although God has previously told him that 20th Fox, having bought what he has written from his estate, will make a film of the fragment), and that is daughter might be better off in a room of young girl’s like herself than in the hands of her estranged father. The whirlwind he has experienced is merely empty air.

      Yet, even God listens to this man’s heartfelt confession, and suggests he may keep him on for a while as his assistant.

      The play ends, however, with a spotlight on Tandy, as he sits alone suffering the repercussions of what he has come to realize.

       Friedman’s play is fiercely funny, yet fairly dramatically serious in its meta-physical implications. In the original Tony Perkins played Tandy. And I’d like to see someone of that stature perform it on film, if there were ever to be another production.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (June 2020).

 

Gary Halvorson and David McVicar | Agrippina / 2020 [The Metropolitan Opera Live-HD production]

everybody loves poppea

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vincenzo Grimani (libretto), George Frideric Handel (composer), David McVicar (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Agrippina / 2020 [The Metropolitan Opera Live-HD production]

 

Yesterday Howard and I saw at a local theater the MET Live-HD performance of, so the host Deborah Voight explained, the oldest opera, Handel’s 1709 Agrippina, to ever be performed on the MET stage.

     Given the existence of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (from 1643), his Orfeo (from 1600), and numerous other of such compositions, it seems amazing that this great institution has not attended to the early operatic works in the repertoire. We’ll see if, while embracing more contemporary compositions—something I very much support—whether or not they can reach back into the repository of Baroque and pre-Baroque works as well. Of course, I love the great Verdi standards, the lovely Puccini operas, etc. But we simply need a wider range, which I do believe the current director of the MET, Peter Gelb, is willing to embrace.

     Handel’s opera, written when he was just 24, is a fascinating glimpse into the Baroque world that one might never have imagined. Although, given the sometimes-narrative clumsiness of Agrippina, and the seemingly determined length of this work, there are some limitations.

     Yet, we almost forgive any of the work’s faults when presented with the absolutely stunning singing and performances of the great stars performing this work, most notably Joyce DiDonato (as Agrippina), two countertenors—the wonderful Iestyn Davies (as the Poppea’s main lover, Ottone), and the more comic would-be lover Narciso (Nicholas Tamagna)—a “pants” female performer, Kate Lindsey (as Nerone), the endlessly beautiful singing of Poppea (Brenda Rae), and, representing the lower ranges of the score, Matthew Rose (as Claudio).

   All of these great performers sing so remarkably that it’s almost difficult to perceive just how morally awful most of them are, involving one another, through Agrippina’s evil machinations, into a serial descent into destruction and death. Besides, Baroque operas almost always end with a positive note, in this case everybody amazingly awarded what they most sought.

     It is difficult to even imagine why the lovely Agrippina, married to the Roman emperor Claudio, is so very determined to put her sociopathic son, Nero, covered from heel to toe with tattoos which represent his ostracization from the society in which he lives, into a position of leadership. Perhaps she imagines that she might be the power behind the throne; but in reality Nerone immediately had his own mother murdered. This is after all, a truly treacherous world in which Agrippina attempts to kill both of her would-be admirers—Pallante (Duncan Rock) and Narcisco—by encouraging them to do in one another (by gunshot and a heroin-like drug) along with Claudio’s favorite, who has just saved his life, Ottone.

   She’s totally ruthless—a role that the lively and assertive DiDonato totally embraces (in an intermissions discussion she revealed that she always wanted to portray a figure like Tosca’s Scarpia—in her character’s rather single-minded devotion to get her son to the top of the golden steps of the Roman throne. Perhaps the question of “why?” is simply meaningless in this work. Power is power even if it surely leads to death, including her own.

     The image which dominates this John Macfarlane and David McVicar production is a mausoleum in which all of these significant figures, by opera’s end, are entombed. These individuals were determined to be destroyed almost before they lived out their full lives.

     In this production, the characters engage in promiscuous sex, alcohol, drugs, and many other of the societal sins one could have imagined, along with what I might describe as a bit too much of McVicar’s shtick presentation of these dark events—although the director’s introduction of a harpsichord player as a sort of “cocktail-bar” piano player is quite brilliant.

     Both Agrippina, the most intense liar among them, showering intrigue upon each person she meets like a storm of terrible torments, and her young, almost autistic-inflicted son Nerone, who can hardly walk straightforwardly up to the gold throne he is inexplicably awarded by opera’s end, are self-devoted folks right out of the President Trump playbook. These are the most notable “them and us” figures of the early 18th century. They need to be destroyed, just as they soon are.

     Yet, one wonders at the musical arias they create, particularly in the end of Ottone’s denunciation sung by the tortured, wrongly accused hero, “Otton, qual portentoso fulmine" followed by "Voi che udite il mio lamento"; the later laments of Agrippina “Pensieri, voi mi tormentate”; and the cocaine induced fury of Nerone’s aria “Come nube che fugge dal vento” (“Like a cloud that flees from the wind”). 

     If much of this amazing opera seems rather rote, right out of the young Handel’s Baroque playbook, with a far too many repeated statements and implorations, given the splendiferous performances of countertenor Davies, the always amazingly-voiced DiDonato, and the rather startling tonsils of Lindsey (including her fascinating abilities to dance out the role of her Nerone) we are so captivated by this opera that it seems almost impossible to quibble about this piece. I cried at each of these fabulously wonderful moments of performance, so intense and beautifully expressed that you come to truly realize what great operatic singing is all about.

     This concert was dedicated to the former MET diva Mirella Freni, who died this year at the age of 84. A brief intermission performance of her singing talent revealed to all how significant were her abilities. The MET, apparently, now realizes just how much of an archive of great singing and music it represents. And I do believe under Gelb’s directorship it might continue to perceive itself as an impossibly endangered wonderland of operatic possibilities.

      The intelligent woman who sat next to me spotted the MET’s cameras focusing in a balcony seat on Jake Heggie, in whose opera Dead Man Walking DiDonato had also previously performed. I shared with her that his opera would be staged and presented at the MET (presumably in a live-HD production) in April of this year. My neighbor had evidently worked with Heggie at UCLA. I can never get over the fact that the people I meet in the opera are often just as interesting as the stars I encounter upon the stage.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2020).

Alice Wu | The Half of It / 2020

love and sausage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Wu (screenwriter and director) The Half of It / 2020

 

Alice Wu’s film The Half of It, from 2020, might easily be dismissed as yet another coming of age comedy-drama about discovering oneself suddenly as part of the larger LGBTQ community. Depending upon the writers and directors, such a realization can either be confusing and painful, as in David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen, or a far easier transition, supported by fellow students, as in Craig Johnson’s Alex Strangelove.

     The Half of It visits neither of these extremes. The central figure in Wu’s film is simply a well-adjusted young Chinese-born American girl, Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), a bit shy perhaps, but so intelligent and capable that she has not only taken over her father’s duties as a train station master, while he continues in near perpetual mourning for the death of his wife. A straight A student as well, Ellie earns extra money, mostly to pay the electric bills and other family needs, by writing most of the local football players’ English essays.

     Her teacher, Mrs. Geselchap (Becky Ann Baker) well knows what is going on, but almost appreciates Ellie’s plagiaristic interactions for allowing her to read intelligent essays instead of the drivel the males of her classroom might have otherwise produced. A graduate of Grinnell college, in a small town in Iowa (I’ve been there). The teacher insists that Ellie should apply there, knowing that with her grades and work ethic, she would most certainly be accepted.  But Ellie cannot imagine leaving her small town of Squahamish because of the dependency of her father (Collin Chou).

      One day, however, a new figure comes on the scene in the form of another football player Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer), who does not want her to write a paper, but a letter, in particular a love letter to the girl with whom he has fallen in love, Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire), the daughter of the local church deacon of the church where the “heathen” Ellie plays the organ.

      Ellie, at first utterly refuses. But Paul pleads so charmingly—and the new electric bill is three-months overdue—that before she even realizes it she is involved in a Cyrano de Begerac-like bargain with the eager young man.

      After a few letters (not just one, the terms she had originally dictated) and some speech lessons for the not-so-bright Paul, he insists that he should now meet with Aster, who has responded to the letters positively by texting.

       But Ellie argues that he is not yet ready, and works with Paul far further than she had committed to. Finally, at the first meeting, he is disaster, not knowing how to respond to a book which Aster has traveled to Portland’s great bookstore Powell’s to give him as a gift. Moreover, Paul cannot even make every day small talk, and the two sit, in an out-of-the-way restaurant—necessary given her father’s religious strictness—both extremely uncomfortable with each other’s company.

      Obviously, there needs to be further lessons in simple conversation, and further letters—at one moment Ellie, in her description of Aster, describing the girl’s six variations, voices them so eloquently that we know that she loves Aster far more than the enthusiastic Paul, who merely appreciates her beauty.

       Meanwhile, Ellie and the viewer begin to perceive aspects of Paul which, despite his rather inchoate way of expressing himself, are actually quite loveable—especially when talking about his life-time dream of creating the perfect sausage taco.

      Chasing away those rowdies from the school who have previously mocked the determined, badly dressed, and virginal Ellie, the two become friends, Paul’s mentor and father both try Paul’s current version of his sausage, against their suspicions about it. Amazingly, and despite the carboard-like texture of the taco (we’ve all had those store-bought taco shells, which I continue to hate, while Howard willingly accepts them.), both agree that the sausage is tasty, and before long Ellie is also writing nearby food critics, which Paul has previously tried but failed to attract. Soon after, Paul has begun working in the kitchen with Ellie’s father in an attempt to discover new versions of sausage.

     Paul’s second meeting with Aster succeeds only a little better than the first, she suggesting that the two talk, this time, about everyday things instead of books. Paul is convinced that their conversation has gone on beautifully, but Ellie, listening in, knows as we know that Paul is still no natural charmer.

      Yet he is so excited that the encounter that when he observes both Aster and Ellie in the crowd for a football game, wherein the Squahamish team is already down 49 to 0. Catching it almost by accident, Paul runs the ball across the goal post, putting the team, at least, on the score board which, apparently, has not occurred for an exceptionally long time, turning Paul into a bit of a local hero.

      After accidentally discovering Ellie’s letters addressed to local food critics, he rushes forward to suddenly kiss her—evidently her first kiss—unfortunately at the very moment that Aster is standing at the doorway. Ellie rushes forward to try to explain to Aster that the event is not at all what it looks like.

    At the school amateur concert—mandatory for all seniors, and despite the fact that Ellie’s performance is preceded by the popular school jock, Trig Carson and his band, Ellie plays a simple guitar song of her own creation, wowing even those who have previously made fun of her.

      Aster even invites Ellie to her home, but quickly suggests they take a ride in her car to Aster’s “favorite secret place,” a hidden hot spring, where she suddenly gets undressed and enters. Ellie, fully dressed in bib overalls and terribly colored long johns, gradually joins her, with Aster eventually pulling off Ellie’s clothes. For a few minutes, the girls enjoy the warmth of the sun and pool and, we gather, one another’s company.

      This is perhaps the only suggestion that there might be a budding lesbian relationship between the two. It is never reiterated, and is only a hint at what their friendship might mean to each other.

      Back at the church the next day, the self-enchanted Trig is asked to lead the group prayer, but takes the time, instead, to ask Aster, in front of all parishioners to become the perfect wife whom he has been seeking.

      The confused and quite passive Aster is clearly about to say yes, until first Effie, from her high location in the organ loft quickly registers a protest, soon followed by Paul’s again somewhat incoherent rambling about why it would not be a good choice.

       Aster’s father and his religious associates, unable to comprehend these deniers, ask Trig to proceed, but this time Ellie truly speaks out, descending her loft position to report before everyone that it is she who has written all Trig’s assignments for years, and attempting to make it clear to Aster that she is better loved by others, both herself and Paul.

       Suddenly realizing who has really written Paul’s letters, Aster breaks away, moving down the church aisle, stopping only to slap Paul’s face for his outright lies.

        Ellie, despite her inclinations to stay with her father, has indeed applied to Grinnell College and has been accepted. As she is about to travel off to Iowa (to a town as small almost as Squahmish, but, at least, filled with college students) she encounters Aster one last time, the beautiful and beloved girl admitting that she perhaps had always suspected that the beautiful letters she received were penned by Ellie. She announces that she has applied to art school, news that makes Ellie quite happy for her.

       Ellie prepares to go, but suddenly turns back to kiss Aster full on her lips, insisting that she will be back in two years to discover what then might happen between the two.

       It becomes fully clear that Ellie now has come to accept herself as lesbian and that, just perhaps, that the rather clueless Aster may eventually recognize her own sexuality.

       In a movie she has previously attended with Paul, Ellie mocked the lover running beside the train to say a last farewell to his girlfriend. She well knows trains, she insists, and no one can actually catch up with them.

       But now Paul—who has come to her father’s station to see her off—runs after the train in which Ellie sits. Unlike Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon, we know that there is no chance in a million years that Ellie will sweep the running would-be lover into the car with her. For she now knows herself, and like Gertrude Stein writes in her great opera The Mother of Us All realizes: “Men Are Such Poor Things.”

      Earlier, Ellie’s father has insisted that he will keep the boy busy for years, testing out new versions of pork and sausage.

      Wu’s film is handled so deftly, that even when nothing seems to happen, we recognize it as representing absolutely everything that’s profoundly important about life. This film won at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2020). 

 

Pedro Almodóvar | Tacones lejanos (High Heels) (aka Distant Heels) / 1991

coming back to go away again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Tacones lejanos (High Heels) (aka Distant Heels) / 1991

 

A day after watching Egoyan’s film Guest of Honour, I selected, completely by accident to see a Pedro Almodóvar film that I had previously missed, High Heels, or more properly given its Spanish title, Tacones lejanos, Distant Heels.

     I describe this viewing as accidental simply because of the kinship of the Almodóvar work with the Egoyan film, both employing as their dominant genre, melodrama, and the focus in both films

upon the sometimes-lethal relationships between young girls and their fathers and mothers.

     A motivation similar to the central figure of Egoyan’s work—in which the young heroine “kills” her victims only symbolically—lies behind the young Rebeca’s (Victoria Abril) actual murder in High Heels of her step-father, who has treated her mother abusively and threatens to divorce her. Rebecca’s second murder of her own husband—perversely her mother, Becky del Páramo’s (Marisa Paredes), former boyfriend—derives from parallel issues, with Manuel abusing Rebecca and threatening divorce.

     In both films, moreover, the daughters suffer enormously over what they feel is the loss of love of their parents, the cheating father in Guest of Honor and the famous but always absent singer-mother in High Heels.

     The early part of the Almadóvar’s film, in fact, seems to set out the director’s recognizable landscape of LGBTQ concerns. Rebeca, so it appears, has become enchanted by a transvestite performer in a local club, Lethal (Miguel Bosé), whose major song is a tribute to her own mother earlier in her career, Agustín Lara’s “Piensa en Mí,” and has grown so fond of the performance and performer—whom it is clear that her macho husband abhors—that she helps her change costumes for the next act. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

     Later, when Rebecca ends up in prison—in another parallel with Guest of Honour—we witness several lesbian relationships at play and, in a moment of sheer magic, an all-female prisoner dance to a merengue by Los Hermanos Rosario, which reminds one a bit of the female sharks’ dance in the original version of West Side Story.

     But immediately after, the usual Almodóvar themes are somehow lost, as the sexual proclivities of his characters become far less important than the affinities of gay men to directors such as Douglas Sirk and the appreciation of films from the same melodrama genre such as Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, and particularly Imitation of Life—the last a film which High Heels, to a great degree, even imitates, particularly when we recall that the daughter, Cheryl Crane, of that movie’s star, Lana Turner, stabbed to death her mother’s lover, Johnny Stompanato. And, of course, how can we ever forget Christina Crawford’s 1978 memoir, Mommie Dearest, which almost did in her famous adoptive mother? These incidents too hover over Almodóvar’s story.

     To explain her own horrific relationship to her mother, Rebeca recites a great deal of the plot of Ingmar Bergman’s An Autumn Sonata, in which a great pianist returns home after a long absence; asking her daughter to play a song for which the elder has become quite famous, following up the girl’s performance with an intimidating critique.

    But let us return to Rebeca in the dressing room of the transvestite Lethal, who, upon catching a glimpse of his obviously well-endowed genitals, allows herself the enjoyment of having sex with him/her, at which time, we soon discover, Rebeca is impregnated. It’s difficult, after that moment, to see Lethal as one of Almodóvar’s more fragile if street-hardened transvestites. And the lesbian relationships of the prisoners seems to go nowhere, until one of the girls attempts to buy a jacket from another, which just happens to be the loyal nurses’ boyfriend Hugo’s identifying wrap. Presented with a nude picture of “Hugo,” Rebecca recognizes him as Lethal from the birthmark on his penis.

      A sympathetic judge, Eduardo Dominguez, who only superficially interrogates the mother and daughter, the lover (now both former and, since Becky has started up a new affair with Manuel, current), and his wife about the murder; he finds no convincing evidence, and without explanation releases Rebeca from jail, despite the fact that Rebeca has confessed to the killing on television!

      Invited to the last performance of Lethal’s act, Rebeca reluctantly attends, finding in the dressing room not only Lethal/Hugo, but the Judge Dominguez, whose sartorial beard and side-burns, it turns out, are only part of another costume. He vaguely attempts to explain that his drag-self was created in order to track down a murderer of transvestites; but the more important thing he offers up is his desire to marry Rebecca, since they have already begun a family of sorts, he diffidently adds.

      If both Rebeca and Lethal/Hugo/Dominguez have kept a few secrets from each other, so too has the girl’s mother, Becky, as they soon discover that she has returned to Madrid not to seek out her long-abandoned daughter but because she is suffering from a serious heart condition.

      At the hospital, she privately asks Rebeca once more if she actually murdered Manuel, since her daughter has confessed to it and then denied the confession. Yes, Rebeca answers, I killed him. One of the best lines of the film is Becky’s response: “You really have to find a new way to deal with your problems with men.”

      About to die, the mother herself confesses to the murder, ordering up the gun in secret to make certain her handprints are pasted upon it. The two then settle down for a final talk, Rebeca describing how the sound of her mother’s heels approaching always helped to sleep; in the original, it is the sound of her mother’s heels after she has returned and is moving back down the hall that reassures the child. The distance of those heels is important because it is only “out” of the mother’s all-enveloping shadow, that Rebeca can return to normal life.

      While she speaks, she soon discerns her mother has died. And perhaps it is only now that Becky has retreated for the last time, that in a marriage to Dominguez the daughter may come into her own.

     We can only have some doubts, however, given the fact that her new fiancé has a strange relationship with his own rather overpowering mother, who spends her days in bed creating celebrity scrapbooks, while complaining of all the illnesses she has imaginatively contracted—the most recent one being AIDS, which worries her about her son’s undercover activities. It’s a sly reference to the fact that perhaps this family tale is only a hiatus from this director’s usual concerns. A few years later, in All About My Mother Almodóvar, in fact, made one of his best films that might almost be described as oddly connected to High Heels.

       Although popular in Spain and Italy, High Heels was highly unpopular in the US and elsewhere.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).