Heading Home with “The Warriors”

New York, New York, a helluva town
The Bronx is up, and the Battery's down
The people ride in a hole in the groun'

 That’s the deathless lyric from On the Town, the Leonard Bernstein/Comden & Green musical delight that was a hit on Broadway and later on the silver screen. There are a lot of references to underground travel in this show, including the fact that its leading lady is first seen on a subway poster proclaiming her as the current “Miss Turnstiles.” (Yes, for years pretty New Yorkers really vied to be named Miss Subways.)

 No question that a lot of great movies are set on the sidewalks of New York, whether we’re talking about romantic comedies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s or crime dramas like Mean Streets or Woody Allen’s quirky valentines to his native city. And the world under the sidewalk is featured in some explosive thrillers, including The Incident (1967) and The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974 and 2009), where much of the action is confined to a subway car under siege. But I just saw a movie that should take the prize for its continual focus on the  ins and outs of the New York transit system.

 Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), today regarded as a cult classic, has an unusual origin story. The novel on which it is based was inspired by historical writings from ancient Greece, Xenophon’s Anabasis. This is an account of a Greek army, known as the Ten Thousand, and its desperate struggle to return home from a bloody expedition in Persia. How times have changed! Both the Sol Yurick novel and the film are set among street gangs in New York City. There’s a meant-to-be-peaceful confab in the Bronx, at which a charismatic leader named Cyrus (a nod to the story’s classical roots) outlines a plan for the gangs to join forces in order to outnumber the cops and dominate the city. But, uh oh!, Cyrus is suddenly shot dead by an unhinged punk—who manages to spread the word that the leather-vested Coney Island gang called the Warriors are responsible.

 The nine Warriors on whom the story focuses want only to get back to their home turf in Southern Brooklyn, some thirty miles away. That’s why, late at night, they’re in and out of subway stations, desperately trying to evade the other gangs that are bent on punishing them for something they didn’t do. Along the way they get accosted, get tricked, sometimes make foolish choices, and end up with a young woman who’s as tough as they are. It’s an odyssey that’s sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying, but always exhilarating to watch.

 Director Walter Hill decided early on that a purely realistic story about street gangs wouldn’t work. His choice was to amp up the film’s slightly futuristic dark humor, especially seen in the costuming of the various gangs. Though the central nine look appropriately tough in their leathers, other groups go in for more outrageous garb. Like the bat-swinging group who dress in vintage baseball uniforms. And the hippie types, and the ones in bright orange karate-gi. And (my favorites) the gangsters in white face paint who look like French mimes.

 A comic book fan, Hill added to the director’s cut scene-ending “splash panels” in which the live figures briefly turn into drawn images. They add to the larger-than life sense of a timeless story that’s mostly about going home. The sight of the ocean at the end of their long journey is moving indeed. Kudos to Hill and to the novice actors involved with this low-budget gem.

 

Tevye and Tradition: “Between the Temples”

These days cultural blending seems to be the thing among romantic couples. Certainly, I have no objection to true love in whatever form it takes. But I’m a bit weary of movies about Nice Jewish Boys who seem all too eager to cast off their family traditions in order to wed someone from an entirely different background. (Nice Jewish Girls, though, seem to be left high and dry—and then get to be the subject of snide jokes.) “Jewish nebbish falls for pretty blonde shiksa” is of course the premise of the very popular Meet the Parents, which came out in 2000. Twenty-three years later, we had You People, which begins with Jonah Hill’s character, surrounded by family, celebrating the ritual of Rosh Hashanah, then quickly segues into his falling for a handsome African-American woman whose parents (one is Eddie Murphy) are devotees of the Nation of Islam. I didn’t stick around to watch how love conquers all, but the cultural stereotyping on both sides didn’t strike me as all that amusing.

 I’m glad that the new Between the Temples doesn’t depend on the same old tropes. Yes, it’s about an unlikely relationship, but one that deeply respects Jewish tradition, though certainly in an unconventional way. I’ve heard this Sundance favorite described in terms of the age disparity in Harold and Maude, but the imbalance between the two leading players in Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane, isn’t nearly so large. Still, she was his elementary school music teacher ‘way back when. They reunite purely by happenstance. He’s now the cantor at Temple Sinai, where the congregation is remarkably supportive of his inability to sing ever since his wife (described as a novelist and an alcoholic) died in a tragic sidewalk accident. As Cantor Ben mourns and mopes, Carla O’Connor (née Kessler) appears in his classroom and insists she be accepted as a bat mitzvah student. (As a “red diaper baby,” born to parents proud of their atheism, she loved attending her classmates’ bar  mitzvah ceremonies, but never was allowed to pursue a similar coming-of-age ritual for herself.)

 The relationship between Ben and Carla is an increasingly odd one, but I like the fact that it’s based on their mutual enthusiasm for Jewish ritual, though it can be argued that Carla (for one) is more caught up in the beauty of traditional cantorial music than in actual faith. Faith, in fact, seems a complex matter for everyone in the story. I was struck by the fact that all the families portrayed in the film defy stereotype. Perhaps the character who most stubbornly clings to tradition is Ben’s mother’s longtime romantic partner, a woman whom he considers a second mom. She’s a Manila-born convert to Judaism who chairs major synagogue events, professes that Jerusalem is her true home, and is quick to condemn anything she feels violates the minutiae of the religious ritual. (She’s played with ferocity by Dolly de Leon, so memorable in 2022’s darkly comic Triangle of Sadness.)

 I don’t want to suggest that Between the Temples works perfectly. Cantor Ben’s behavior at a key family shabbat dinner is so out of kilter that I just can’t buy it as a set-up for the film’s sweet but highly eccentric ending. But Jason Schwartzman is effectively screwed up as Ben, and it’s a delight to watch a leading screen performance by Carol Kane, whom I’ve loved ever since her Oscar-nominated role in Hester Street back in 1975. I’m not sure what Tevye would have thought of this unorthodox paean to “tradition,” but I’m glad I checked it out. 

 

The Pleasures of Re-Reading Pauline

This was the year I watched a stage revival of Funny Girl, listened again to the original cast recording, and then re-visited the 1968 Funny Girl film adaptation that won Barbra Streisand her Oscar. Honestly, I am not among those who adore Streisand as a singer: her choice of material is always terrific, but for me she has a tendency to work too hard at opera-worthy climaxes that would be better served by gentler treatment. Still, I find myself more and more impressed by her acting smarts. I know her original aim was to be an actress, not a singer, and in revisiting several of her old films I see a real superstar talent at work.

 Which made it fun for me to open this week’s New Yorker and discover it was an archival issue, featuring reviews and articles from years gone by. Naturally, I turned right to the Current Cinema section, and discovered that “current” applied to the year 1968, when Pauline Kael was the movie reviewer in residence. Kael was always worth reading, even when you didn’t agree with her.. A journalistic powerhouse, she loved movies so fervently that she could make you love them too. (It didn’t always work: On the strength of her lively prose, I actually went to see mediocre movies like the 1976 King Kong, in which a giant ape curiously checks out the bosom of a very young Jessica Lange.) Perhaps Kael’s greatest coup was convincing the American public that Bonnie and Clyde was a full-fledged masterpiece. Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern, on the strength of her recommendation, watched the film a second time, then wrote a rave that fully rescinded his previous dismissal of it as a minor gangster flick. I’m sure he was not the only critic persuaded by Kael to rethink a dismissive review.

 The Kael review that sits open on my desk is from September 28, 1968, and it’s wholly devoted to the film version of Funny Girl. Like me, Kael is blown away not by Streisand’s singing but by her acting chops. She starts by assessing the whole meaning of stardom: “There’s hardly a star in American movies today, and if we’ve got so used to the absence of stars that we no longer think about it much, we’ve also lost one of the great pleasures of moviegoing: watching incandescent people up there, more intense and dazzling than people we ordinarily encounter in life, and far more charming than the extraordinary people we encounter, because the ones on the screen are objects of pure contemplation . . .”  (The thought goes on for several more lines; I don’t think anyone else can conquer the run-on sentence the way Kael can.)

 Kael emphatically places Streisand among those “wisecracking heroines, the clever funny girls” who once brightened the screen in the thirties and forties. Among them she mentions Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carol Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Myrna Loy, “and all the others who could be counted on to be sassy and sane.” By the same token, she discovers in Streisand (during the movie’s lugubrious second act) “an aptitude for suffering” that those clever actresses lacked: “Where they became sanctimonious and noble, thereby violating everything we had loved them for, she simply drips as unself-consciously and impersonally as a true tragic muse.”

 If Kael loves Streisand, she unequivocally hates the rest of the film, especially Omar Shariff as her love interest, gambler Nicky Arnstein. As she points out, “If shady gamblers are not going to be flashy and entertaining, what good are they as musical-comedy heroes?” Good question, Pauline!  

 

“Ran”: The Dangerous Women of Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa started making films in Japan during World War II. I’ve seen one of his most charming early efforts, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, a period piece based on ancient Kabuki and Noh plays about some roguish samurai who disguise themselves as monks. Made in 1945 (but not released until 1952), it features Kurosawa’s signature blending of high and low-class characters.

 Another jidaigeki (or “period drama”), one that brought Kurosawa international fame, was Rashomon, a 1950 adaptation of stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Starring such Kurosawa regulars as Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, and Takashi Shimura, it deals with the mysterious death of a samurai in a woodland setting. Three versions of what happened are brought forward:  one tale is told by the samurai’s wife, a second by the bandit who accosted the pair, a third by the dead samurai from beyond the grave, speaking through a medium. In each version, the teller comes off very well indeed. Finally, a woodcutter who has spied on the entire incident gives his own account, in which the three principals are all self-serving and comically inept.

  One of the delightful elements of Rashomon is its handling of the lady who is the samurai’s wife. In her own telling of the story, she is both modest and noble, heroically defending her virtue against the marauding bandit. But other versions reveal her to be quite different: lascivious and something of a shrew. Traditional Japanese culture so often portrays females as paragons of virtue, or as long-suffering Madame Butterflies. But Kurosawa, to his credit, acknowledges that women are not so easily categorized.

 Certainly, this is the case in Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood, his feudal Japanese retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The dangerously ambitious Lady Macbeth, here called Lady Asaji Washizu, is truly a horror.  Of course this portrayal follows the lead of the sixteenth-century English playwright who first invented her. But in his late-in-life 1985 masterwork, Ran, Kurosawa adds to the familiar story of King Lear an additional element that shows a woman in a very harsh, though highly dramatic, light.

 King Lear, needless to say, begins with an ageing monarch retreating from public life by offering his kingdom to his three daughters. He wrongly assumes they will continue to honor him in his old age, only to find that the two he has favored have no use for him now that he lacks power. Ran, tells a similar story about a fictional warlord named Hidetora Ichimonji, who chooses to leave his kingdom to his three sons. As in  King Lear, the two eldest turn on him; only the third son—the honest one he has rejected—comes through in his moment of need. Because this is a jidaigeki, there is much brutal jostling for power, featuring what looks to be a cast of thousands. But there is also a subplot that is nowhere to be found in Shakespeare.

 Lady Kaede, the wife of the oldest son, has much reason to hate her father-in-law, who once destroyed her entire family in order to claim their castle for himself. When first seen, she’s protesting that she feels no anger; as a Buddhist she understands that none of us can avoid the whims of fate. But after her husband’s death in battle, the grieving widow shows up in his brother’s quarters: and suddenly her meekness explodes into wrath. Brandishing a very sharp knife, she first threatens to slice his throat . . . and then the scene becomes an erotic tryst. This is her form of revenge, and it leads to retribution that is hardly pretty.

 

 

 

 

Hitchcock-Lite: “The Man Who Knew too Much”

 I’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It’s a thriller, of course, one that climaxes with an assassination attempt planned for a climactic orchestral  moment at London’s Albert Hall. Peter Lorre is involved as a criminal mastermind, so you know that things are going to get seriously creepy.

 More than twenty years later, Hitchcock basically recycled his original plot for Hollywood. His 1956 take on The Man Who Knew Too Much is 45 minutes longer than the British version, and features two of Hollywood’s most popular actors, James Stewart and Doris Day. (Taking advantage of Day’s musical chops, Hitchcock and company make her a retired singing star, and weave into the plot her crooning of a new song, “Que Sera Sera,” which ultimately won an Oscar.)

 As in so many Hitchcock films, the leading characters are innocents who find themselves caught up in an evil scheme they must ultimately help to foil. See, for instance, the classic North by Northwest, in which businessman Cary Grant ultimately helps uncover some serious skullduggery.. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Stewart and Day play a married couple traveling abroad with their young son. In Morocco they meet a mysterious Frenchman whose sudden death embroils them in intrigue, resulting in young Hank being kidnapped and whisked off to England. Of course the rest of the film involves the couple’s desperate search for their child, certainly a matter of the greatest seriousness. But this is a movie in which Hitchcock’s playful side shines through. Though the kidnapping of a kid is horrendous, we in the audience are never in doubt about Hank’s ultimate safety. That’s because Hitchcock plays down the jeopardy he faces, while devoting much of the film to the comedy of innocents abroad trying hard to grapple with unfamiliar cultures and unexpected bad guys.

 We first meet Ben, Jo, and young Hank McKenna on a bus ride from Casablanca to Marrakesh, where they immediately run afoul of local customs. (As the bus lurches, Hank accidentally snatches the veil off a Muslim woman’s face.) Though they’re surrounded by questionable characters, the focus is on the comic joshing and bickering of husband and wife. He’s an Indiana  doctor, and at one point they humorously note how his various operations back home have helped fund the luxuries they’re enjoying on this trip. And there’s a great deal of comedy in the key scene where they make new friends at an authentic Moroccan restaurant. (The tall, lanky Ben can’t manage the low couches in the dining room, nor can he figure out how to successfully eat with one hand, Moroccan-style.)

 Even after the horror they face when they learn of their son’s abduction, the McKennas are thrust into situations that can only be called comedic. When they arrive in London, a gaggle of British friends descend on their hotel suite, eager to reminisce about old times. While Ben dashes off to confront a certain Ambrose Chappell, who may hold the key to their son’s whereabouts, Jo is ordering drinks and desperately trying to entertain these unwanted guests. Ultimately, the action moves to the Albert Hall for that climactic concert. (Composer Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the score containing the would-be-fatal cymbal crash, makes a cameo appearance as the orchestra’s conductor). When all three McKennas, reunited at last, return to the hotel, they find their guests are still ensconced in their suite, totally snockered.

 The famous Hitchcock cameo? It’s  not one of his better ones--and the same goes for this enjoyable but very slight film.

 

 

 

The Olympic Games Go Hollywood

Now that the Paris Olympics are history, I can go back to watching movies instead of international sporting events. But I must say I fully enjoyed 16 days of stirring competition, despite the sometimes smarmy NBC coverage and (of course) the endless commercials. The games themselves were mostly a delight: exciting outcomes, lots of sideline drama, and the most beautiful locations imaginable. (How can L.A. in 2028 possibly hope to compete with those shots of the Eiffel Tower? Honestly, the plugs at the end of the late-night broadcast for our next Olympic Games made my birth city look gorgeous, though I’ve learned that a lot of the hoopla on the beach was filmed not in L.A. or Santa Monica but some miles down the freeway in Long Beach.) 

 Once upon a time, I was lucky to attend the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. It was a simpler era, with less demand for outsized spectacle. The highlights, as I remember them, included the finale of the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon: we all cheered for the last-place finisher as she staggered painfully into the Coliseum, clearly ailing but waving off medical help because she was determined to finish the race. There was also Lionel Ritchie singing about partying as though it were 1999 (that date seemed so far off!). And the Joffrey Ballet (then L.A.-based) performed in tandem with a Korean dance troupe, as a prelude to 1988 in Seoul.

 One thing that surprised me about Paris 2024 was the TV coverage’s repeated emphasis on Hollywood stars in the stands. The NBC cameras picked out the celebs: Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, et al. Then of course there was the constant intrusion of ageing rapper Snoop Dog, sometimes with his BFF (really!) Martha Stewart. True, Snoop does come off as surprisingly endearing, but I would have strongly preferred coverage of some of the more obscure sports and some of the more exotic national teams. I’m sure they had their own stories to tell.

 At the Paris closing ceremony, following a rather overblown dance-drama about the resurrection of the Olympic games of ancient Greece, we moved into an L.A. state of mind via a memorable stunt that underscored the Hollywood aspects of Southern California.  It featured none other than Tom Cruise, plunging into the stadium from on high, grabbing the Olympic flag, and roaring off on a handy motorcycle, heading through the streets of Paris to an L.A.-bound plane. What fun! But also a promise that LA 2028 would be heavily invested in Hollywood star culture.

 Which made me muse  about how many movies have used the Olympics as their climax. Some have been silly (like Walk, Don’t Run, a wildly exaggerated look at Tokyo 1964 that featured race-walking and Cary Grant). Some have been stirring, like The Boys in the Boat and (best of the lot) Chariots of Fire. Of course there have been documentaries too. The most notorious is Olympia, the portrait of the 1936 Munich games by Adolf Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. Tasked with glorifying the Fatherland, she introduced brilliant camera techniques that are still widely used today. She also included plenty of awe-inspiring Hitler footage, but couldn’t resist according the same admiring gaze to the Black American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in track and field events.

 It used to be that newly-minted Olympic champions went to Hollywood and got turned into movie stars. Like Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller and skating cutie Sonja Henie. But it didn’t always work. Remember the acting career of Mark Spitz?  

 

Barbershop Blues: “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”

Who knew that a haircut could cause such a commotion? In 1920, the young F. Scott Fitzgerald published in the Saturday Evening Post a short story he drew from his younger sister’s social anxieties. It was called “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and the title had always made me curious. I finally caught up with Bernice and her social set via a 1976  episode of The American Short Story, an ambitious TV anthology series hosted by PBS between 1974 and 1980. The 17 episodes all featured major Hollywood stars and first-class directors presenting works by some of America’s most revered authors, including Mark Twain, Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor.  

 At the close of PBS’s 46-minute Bernice Bobs Her Hair, one of the major production credits goes to a wig-maker. This is hardly surprising, because all the women in the story start out with great masses of long hair, which (true to the style rules of 1920) they pile onto their heads during the day and arrange into long, thick braids before going to sleep. One of these proper young ladies is Bernice (Shelley Duvall), visiting her big-city cousin Marjorie from her home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Marjorie is a social butterfly, who knows how to flirt with the young men, back for the summer from Ivy League colleges, who are at her beck and call. Bernice, by contrast, is shy and awkward; her only social gambit is to complain about how much hotter St. Paul is than Eau Claire.

 Finally, pushed by her mother to treat her cousin more kindly, Marjorie tutors Bernice on how to flirt, and how to become a witty conversationalist, going right up to the edge of social propriety. Learning her lessons perhaps too well, Bernice begins to enthrall the young men with daring remarks. At a swanky dinner party, she announces her determination to bob her hair, in emulation of the sexy “picture-show vampires” of the day. (Today we would call them “femmes fatales“ or “vamps.”) Her listeners, accustomed to far more conservative styles, are both fascinated and scandalized by her daring. She acknowledges that for a woman hair-shearing would be immoral, but (with her cousin across the table quietly signaling assent) she declares that to get on in this world you’ve got to amuse people, or shock them.

 It's unclear if Bernice will go ahead with her boast, until Cousin Marjorie eggs her into putting her bold words into practice. At which point several things happen, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the story’s highly ironic ending. Let’s just call it bittersweet.

 I discovered this filmed version of the Fitzgerald story while exploring the career of the late Shelley Duvall, best known for being absolutely terrified as Jack Nicholson goes crazy in The Shining. Duvall, who by all accounts fell into the film world accidentally, never had the look of a conventional Hollywood glamour-girl. With her huge eyes, buck teeth, soft voice, and beanpole frame, she easily projects a wallflower’s discomfort. But when she begins to show her saucy side, it’s remarkable how she sparkles, only to retreat once the deed is done back to a version of her former self. Kudos to her, to Veronica Cartwright as Cousin Marjorie and to Bud Cort (of Harold and Maude fame) as a promising suitor. Big congratulations to the talented Joan Micklin Silver, who in the previous year had written and directed Hester Street, an adaptation of Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novella about love among Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. Silver is adept at establishing precise social milieus through a canny use of visuals and music. Brava! 

  

Capturing “Thieves Like Us”

In the wake of the critical and popular success of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, Hollywood was suddenly hungry for other films that featured young lovers on the lam. I will not soon forget 1973’s Badlands, a fictionalized version of the real-life murder spree of two very young sweethearts. (That film marked the directorial debut of Terrence Malick, and introduced many moviegoers to Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen.) In the following year, Robert Altman—best known at the time for M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye—tried his hand at a period crime drama, Thieves Like Us. I sought it out as part of my personal farewell to the late Shelley Duvall, and found it both imaginatively conceived and surprisingly moving.

 Thieves Like Us is based on a 1937 novel that had previously been adapted into a noir classic, They Live By Night, which marked the directorial debut of Nicholas Ray. While that 1948 film bowed slightly to the moral requirements of its era, having its lovers marry and showing the male protagonist struggling with his conscience, Altman’s work is more matter-of-fact about the impulses that drive Bowie (well played by Keith Carradine) into an ongoing life of crime. Apparently, a tragic boyhood landed him in prison at a very young age. Now he’s busted out, along with the erratic Chickamaw (Altman favorite John Schuck), and they’ve teamed up with would-be-comedian T-Dub (Bert Remsen) to rob a series of local banks. This all takes place in rural Depression-era Mississippi, and Bowie’s partners-in-crime seem to have a steady stream of local friends and relatives who’ll put them up (or put up with them) if need be.

 Bowie seems happy enough to go along with the schemes of his more experienced pals. But an auto accident puts him out of commission, and he finds himself being tended by Keechie, a shy young woman (Shelley Duval) who could badly use a little affection in her life. Needless to say, they quickly become lovers, and their destinies are forever changed. She wants a future based on happy domesticity; he’s not about to give up the only source of income he knows. And he’s a bit proud, to be honest, that his gang’s exploits are now making the local papers, complete with big photos and $100 bounties in store for those who bring then in, dead or alive.  You can guess where all this leads.

 Part of the film’s charm is Altman’s canny use of audio design. In place of a musical score, he relies on radio broadcasts of the era to set the ongoing mood. Everyone’s life seems to revolve around the radio, whether they’re at home or in their cars. In the course of the film, we hear snatches of crime dramas (Gangbusters! The Shadow!) as well as FDR’s Fireside Chats and Father Coughlin sermons. At one point there’s a snatch of something called The Royal Gelatin Hour. And the film’s big sex scene erupts while Keechie and the bed-ridden Bowie are listening to a solemn Theater of the Air presentation of snippets from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This of course sets us up for the film’s inevitable tragic ending.

 The other detail that helps communicate time and place is the fact that green glass bottles of Coca-Cola are present in almost every scene. But I’ll leave the final message to Chickamaw, who—when all is said and done—wishes he’d paid attention in school and become a doctor, a lawyer, or a banker. If so, “I coulda robbed people with my brain instead of a gun.”

 

 

 

Sex, Violence, Children, and “Bastard Out of Carolina”

Now that I’m reading Dorothy Allison’s 1993 debut novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, I’m  remembering an article I once wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, in which the TV-film version of this novel played a large role. Allison’s work, based heavily on her own impoverished upbringing, raised many hackles because it unflinchingly depicts the sexual molestation of its pre-teen heroine, who vividly narrates her life story. Born out of wedlock to a fifteen-year-old mother. Anney, in South Carolina, Ruth Anne (called “Bone” by one and all) suffers many indignities because she’s officially been labeled “illegitimate” on her birth certificate. Anney’s attempts to supply her with a male parent end disastrously when a first step-father dies and a second, Glen Waddell, begins to physically abuse her, on the very night that her baby brother is born dead. Though over the years Anney tries to protect Bone, she’s too devoted to her current spouse to ward off the inevitable rape and the violence that accompanies it. Thankfully, the story ends with young Bone finally managing to leave the family unit behind and begin her own independent life.

 Back in 2000, when I was writing about the 1996 filmed version of Bastard Out of Carolina, it was not easy to find. Certainly it has an impressive pedigree. Jennifer Jason Lee is top-billed as Bone’s mother; Ron Eldard plays the nefarious Glen. Also featured in the cast are Glenne Headly, Dermot Mulroney, and a host of other Hollywood regulars. Oscar-winning actress Anjelica Huston made her directorial debut with this project. But the key role of Bone was played by a showbiz newcomer, Jena Malone, who was all of 12 when she was cast. (Her performance got her nominated for Independent Spirit and SAG awards.)

 I had a long phone conversation with Jena Malone when she was not yet 16. At the time, I was working on an article about children who play key roles in films that rely heavily on adult-level sex and violence. The conversations I had with child actors were interesting ones. An eight-year-old who played Mel Gibson’s daughter in a Revolutionary War drama  called The Patriot was hardly put off by the film’s graphic battle scenes. She gleefully reported to me that “the blood is ketchup and stuff. The people who play dead get up and yell ‘Lunch!’”  Still, a child psychiatrist I queried was convinced that, for a young person, playing a victim on screen can trigger severe reactions down the road.

 Post-traumatic stress, I learned, can be particularly acute in young actors whose roles expose them to simulated violence and sexual abuse. That’s partly why some parents are diligent in checking out exactly what will be happening to their kids on the set, and turning down roles they feel will compromise these young actors’ sense of well-being. Still, other Hollywood mons and dads jump at the chance for their youngsters to play central roles in controversial dramas. (After all, Linda Blair nabbed an Oscar nom at 14 for starring in The Exorcist.) I once spent an evening with a deeply religious family. They were fully convinced that their 6-year-old daughter’s key role in a film about demonic possession would be a boon to all humanity.

 When I chatted with Jena Malone about Bastard Out of Carolina, I was surprised by her maturity. She said that at 12 she had fully understood the implications of the story’s sexual scenes and wanted them to be accurately depicted. My thoughts? I was glad my own young daughter would never be in the position of playing such a role.