Growing Pains: Exploring “Adolescence”

Adolescence is a bland-sounding title for a limited TV series out of Britain that has accumulated eleven Emmy award nominations. Winners in this prestigious category  have included, over the decades, some of TV’s best dramas, including   Angels in America, The Queen’s Gambit, and several of Tom Hanks’ historical re-creations, including Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

 I have no crystal ball telling me who will take home the Emmy on September 14. I’m sure there are good things to be said about the other nominees: Black Mirror, Dying for Sex, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, and The Penguin. But I’ll be rooting for Adolescence to nab the top prizes in this category, both because of the importance of its ideas and the excellence of its craft.

 Adolescence has been widely described as a psychological crime drama, and this is accurate, as far as it goes. At its center is a murder, and the killer’s motives are certainly open to question. But there’s no emphasis here on tracking down the bad guy; this is not a case of rising suspense as the noose tightens. First of all, we know almost from the very beginning that the killer is an innocent-looking 13-year-old boy, who has dispatched a female classmate with multiple stabs of a knife. The real question is: why did this happen? Over the course of four one-hour episodes, the impact of the killing is approached from four very different angles. What makes for exciting television is the fact that each of the four has a different focus, requiring us to see a bloody but straightforward deed from very different perspectives.

 And, thrillingly, each of these four episodes is shot in a single (though very complex) take, which has the effect of drawing us into what seems like a televised reality program. This is especially true of Episode 1, in which—without preliminaries—a heavily armed police squad bursts into a working-class English home, terrifying its occupants. They head directly for an upstairs bedroom where a boy cowers in bed, in a room brightly decorated with outer space images. Jamie is told to get dressed, then is hustled out of the room, leaving his well-worn teddy bear behind. The murder charge seems as impossible to us as it does to his parents and sister, and Jamie denies everything. Throughout we can’t help admiring the professional way the British cops make sure his rights are protected.

 Episode 2 is led by a police detective who visits the school attended by both killer and victim. Again the emotions are raw, as students mourn their dead classmate and try to avoid being in any way implicated in the tragedy. But Detective Bascombe’s own son, an older student at the school, clues his father in to Instagram practices that may hold a clue to what’s going on.

 The heart of the drama is Episode 3, entirely devoted to a session between Jamie and a forensic psychologist. Here for the first time we grasp the complexity of the young man’s emotions  (Owen Cooper became the all-time youngest Emmy nominee in this category for this episode), and also the toll they take on his professional but kindly questioner.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is Episode 4, in which Jamie (facing trial) is only a voice on the telephone. That’s because we’re focused entirely on his well-meaning parents, who feel tremendous guilt for their son’s actions. The father, movingly played by Stephen Graham (also the co-author of the series) is a kind, serious man devoted to family life. Could he have stopped this tragedy? Could anyone?  

 

 

 

Leaving Home to Find a Home: “Moscow on the Hudson”

There are émigrés from Soviet Russia in my extended family circle, so I’ve heard plenty of stories about the bad old days in the USSR. And this year’s Oscar-winning Anora gave me an indelible glimpse of today’s globe-trotting Russian oligarchs, as well as the pockets of old-school Russian culture in New York’s Brighton Beach. All of which made me eager to enjoy Robin Williams in Paul Mazursky’s gentle 1984 comedy about a defector from Moscow in the era of Ronald Reagan.

 The film is an extended flashback, following a glimpse of Wiliams’ Vladimir Ivanov showing a newer arrival to NYC the ropes. So we know from the start that nothing very terrible is going to happen to Vladimir after he impulsively decides to make New York City his new home. Vladimir, a saxophone player with a great love of American jazz, has traveled to the Big Apple as part of a Russian circus troupe. On the group’s last day, during a quickie group shopping spree at Bloomingdale’s, he suddenly eludes the grim-faced Soviet minders and declares his intention of staying on in this “decadent” new land. His impulsive decision of course has major consequences: the American public and America media briefly rally on his behalf, but he’s cut off forever from the close-knit Russian family he loves.

 Mazursky, always good with social details, researched life in 1980s Moscow and blended this with his own grandfather’s memories of emigrating from Ukraine to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century. For me (and for many critics) the film’s richest moments come in its first third, when we are introduced to Vladimir in the context of his Old World relatives. We spend time in their cramped apartment, and see their heartfelt joy when Vladimir comes home with gifts: he’s braved a very long line in order to successfully purchase armloads of toilet paper rolls. He’s saved one roll as a romantic offering to the curvaceous young woman he habitually beds in the flat borrowed from a friend, Anatoly, for this purpose. Anatoly, one of the clowns in Vladimir’s circus, brashly declares himself desperate to leave the Soviet Union in search of the freedoms promised by the U.S.A.  But though Anatoly speaks often about defecting, he ultimately can’t bring himself to take the risk. (He’s played by the Latvian-born Elya Baskin, whose tragicomic face I’ll long remember.) Anatoly’s ultimate fear of making a change is why Vladimir’s impulsive action is such a surprise to those around him. And the moment of  his defection—complete with security guards, the press, the FBI, a very gay Bloomie’s salesclerk, and a lot of others—is hilarious.

 From this point forward, the film loses some steam, spending much of its time on Vladimir’s on-again-off-again romantic relationship with a pretty Italian-born salesclerk played by Maria Conchita Alonso (who’s not exactly Italian, but you get the idea). Part of Mazursky’s point is that in America almost everyone (aside from some key African American characters) is a recent arrival from somewhere else. And immigration is portrayed in such a glowing light that I could only shake my head at how times have changed. There’s a touching little scene in which Alonso’s character and a host of others ceremonially take the oath to become U.S. citizens. And in a diner, after a worn-down Vladimir dares to briefly criticize his new country, the other patrons—from a host of cultures—take him to task, even movingly reciting from the Declaration of Independence about how all men are created equal. We certainly need some of that idealism today. 

 

 

Boys Will Be Boys: “Mikey and Nicky”

Elaine May has always had a fraught relationship with Hollywood. After her early glory years as one-half of the Nichols and May comedy duo, she wrote and directed her first feature film, a pitch-black comedy called A New Leaf, in 1971. It fared poorly at the box office, but is now considered a cult classic, inducted in 2019 into the National  Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The following year, May directed a Neil Simon script that became a major hit: The Heartbreak Kid, starring Charles Grodin as a jerk who dumps his annoying bride (May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin) during their honeymoon and jumps into bed with a beautiful blonde (Cybill Shepherd). Frankly I’ve often found this film disturbing in its reliance on ethnic stereotypes, but audiences responded with glee, and Berlin won several major awards for her outrageously unattractive portrayal.

 So May was riding high the following year when she wrote and shot Mikey and Nicky (1976), a so-called “neo-noir” starring good friends Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. When I watched this film, I knew nothing about where it was going. Frankly, I thought it would play up the comic aspects of a longtime relationship. And so it did, if you like your humor very dark indeed. The film, set amid the squalor of an east-coast city, starts with Cassavetes’ Nicky holed up in a seedy hotel room, frantically summoning his lifelong pal Mikey to save him from the wrath of a boss who’s clearly a dangerous thug. (He’s played by the legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner.) There are some laughs to be had in Mikey (Falk) showing up with a cache of Gelusil for his buddy’s ulcer and then trying to hustle him out of town.

 Thus begins an odyssey in which the half-crazed Nicky keeps getting distracted from his own escape plans, with Mikey keeping him company every step of the way. The full story of their relationship unfolds particularly in a midnight over-the-wall jaunt into a local cemetery. There we come to fully understand how long these two have been a part of one another’s lives, sharing tender memories of family members now long gone. They also almost share the favors of a (sort of) prostitute: it’s her angry rejection of Mikey that becomes one of the film’s key turning points.

 h both men are husbands and fathers of young children, they are not what I’d call mature adults. In their slightly different ways they treat women badly: Nicky has destroyed his marriage (to one of my longtime favorites, Joyce Van Patten) with his overt philandering; Mikey treats his wife better but clearly doesn’t regard her as an equal. Certainly he doesn’t share with her his many secrets, including the fact that his younger brother died in childhood The film suggests that the central relationship in Mikey and Nicky’s lives is with one another, with all that implies about nostalgia, affection, and jealousy.  Which makes the film’s ending truly poignant.

 From what I’ve read, Elaine May did herself no favors on the set of Mikey and Nicky. Determined to capture the improvisational style of her two leads, she spent far more time and money on the film than her studio had allotted. (I’ve learned she shot almost three times as much footage as was required for Gone With the Wind.)  That’s why the final cut was taken away from her, and the version rushed into theatres by Paramount was haphazard at best. It was 1986 before a May-approved version finally emerged. And she didn’t direct again for eleven years. Yes, it was the notorious Ishtar. 

 

Juliet . . . & (eventually) Romeo

Methinks that every generation has its own Romeo and Juliet, in which the tragic lovers reflect the concerns of the day. The 1936 film directed by George Cukor came out in the midst of the Great Depression. This was a time when young people going the movies craved glamour and sumptuous production values, things they couldn’t find in their own daily lives. Cukor’s MGM-based production featured major (though overaged) stars. Leslie Howard, as Romeo, was in his forties, and Norma Shearer, who played Juliet (and was married to studio honcho Irving Thalberg), was about 34, more than double the age of Shakespeare’s teenage heroine. The film was shot decorously, on elaborate sets, and given the full prestige treatment, complete with splashy roadshow engagements where illustrated programs were sold. (Yes, my mother bought one, and saved it for many decades)

 More than 20 years later, in 1957, a much-updated version of Romeo and Juliet became the toast of Broadway. This of course was West Side Story. The Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical reimagined the star-crossed lovers as recent New Yorkers from rival cultural backgrounds, with Tony as a Polish-American founder of a street gang called the Jets, and Maria, newly arrived from Puerto Rico, as naturally affiliated with the Sharks. The hit play became in 1964 a mega-hit film that gobsmacked everyone at my high school. We were much taken, in that era, with the promise of social justice for all, and the tragic story of lovers unable to transcend the enmity all around them hit us hard. (Steven Spielberg’s 2021 rethinking of the same musical has its merits, but its box-office reception was far less overwhelming, probably because the concerns of moviegoers had much changed in the intervening fifty-plus years.)

 What I consider MY Romeo and Juliet was the Franco Zeffirelli version that came out in the fraught year 1968. It was filmed on location in medieval Italian towns, and was the first cinematic version to feature actors close in age to Shakespeare’s actual characters. Zeffirelli apparently considered casting Paul McCartney and other rock gods of the era, but ended up with two unknowns, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, who were cast when they were 16 and 15, respectively, but aged a year in the course of filming. We college students of the era, many caught up with our own first big romances, watched this movie in a sort of swoony daze, fully understanding the erotic passions of the two young lovers.

 Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to jazz up the Shakespearean story, giving it a kind of hipster sensibility. The year was 1996, and the stars were Leonardo DiCaprio (then 21) and Claire Danes (about 17). The feuding families were played as 20^th century Miami mobster types, with the Capulets now having some Latin roots. The setting was Verona Beach, and one key scene was played in a swimming pool. There’s still some well-spoken Shakespearean poetry, but also guns and party drugs.

 I’m reminiscing about all this because I’ve just seen the L.A. stage production of & Juliet, a London and Broadway hit musical that posits Juliet (waking in the tomb beside the dead Romeo) deciding not to kill herself for love. What follows is a riotous comedy in which pop songs from Max Martin are incorporated into Juliet’s romantic adventures in Paris. (Brittany Spears’ “Oops!... I Did It Again” becomes an acknowledgement that Juliet falls for cute guys a tad too quickly.) The many teens in the house cheered for Juliet’s developing feminist consciousness and for the “woke” gay empowerment motif that predominates. Me? I just felt rather old.

 

 

God and Gold: “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”

Circa 1982, my once and future boss Roger Corman signed on to help distribute Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a bizarre adventure set in the jungles of the Amazon. This was during a ten-year period, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, when Roger went all in on the American distribution of outstanding European art films.

 Ten years earlier, Herzog had made another challenging film set in the rainforests of Peru. It was this earlier film that helped give him an international reputation, and it starred the same actor—the manically intense Klaus Kinski—who was later to be at the center of Fitzcarraldo, the story of a 20^th century man obsessed with the bizarre idea of building an opera house in the jungle. Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a period piece, vaguely linked to historic fact, in which a troop of Spanish conquistadores and their local minions hack and raft their way through Amazon rain forests in a bid to find the fabled lost city of El Dorado.

 Aguirre, a mere 94 minutes long, begins with a slow stretch in which a long line of Pizarro’s Spanish soldiers (as well as slaves, indigenous conscripts, Catholic priests, and—to our surprise—a few elegant ladies in sedan chairs) inch their way through a challenging landscape, from lofty mountaintops down to the Amazon River. So slow-moving is this opening section that I suspect the always impatient Roger Corman would have been itching to trim it, if he had any say in the matter. I got a bit restless too, but my hunch is that Herzog was here sending us a message—that this film would require us to step outside of time and give in to the plodding nature of the actual and the symbolic journey.

 And what a journey! Early on, Pizarro recognizes that it might be pure folly to send the entire regiment in search of an enigmatic city of gold. That’s why he creates a small squadron of maybe forty people and sends them off on rafts, giving them two weeks to return with some usable intel. Things go badly from the start: there are perilous rip currents that trap some of the travelers, as well as concealed but deadly Indian tribes who oppose incursions into their territory. In the face of these challenges, genteel and steady commander Don Pedro de Ursúa is overthrown in a mutiny led by the brooding Don Lope de Aguirre.

 From the moment we first spot him, it’s clear that Aguirre (played, of course by Klaus Kinski) is dangerous. You have only to look into his pale blue eyes to see the madness blazing within. He’s a man caught in the grip of an obsession: to find El Dorado and seize its golden treasures, thus ensuring himself fame as well as fortune. Though others on the trek focus on spreading the glory of God, he himself is fixated on the gold he believes awaits those bold enough to find and claim it.

 The last section of the film concentrates on the way the trip implodes, with those still alive (though starving and debilitated) seeming to lose all touch with reality. Aguirre, who likes calling himself “the wrath of God,” is predictably the last man standing. But his vision of the future contains ominous (and sexually perverse) elements I would rather not discuss. And then there are those visitations from what seems to be another world, but perhaps is just the natural order striking back at man’s hubris. I know one thing: I don’t want to see Klaus Kinski in my dreams. 

 

Where the Boys Are: Remembering Connie Francis

`The passing of plaintive songstress Connie Francis brought me back to my teen years. Francis—whose early pop hits included “Stupid Cupid,” “Lipstick on Your Collar,” and a swoony rendition of the old “Who’s Sorry Now?—played featured roles in movies and then segued into belting out standards for adult audiences. Hers was an eventful life: her father chased away an early suitor, the pre-fame Bobby Darin, and none of her four subsequent marriages ended well. In 1974, while staying post-concert at a Howard Johnson’s motel in upstate New York, she was raped at knifepoint, left naked and tied to a chair by an assailant who was never found. Other family tragedies and health challenges followed, but she eventually resumed her singing career, became a victims’ rights advocate, and survived until the ripe old age of 87.

 I will always associate Connie Francis with Where the Boys Are, a 1960 film seen (sometimes more than once) by every junior high school girl I knew. The film was in many ways a template for the beach party movies that followed (as well as for aspects of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures nurse flicks). We girls appreciated Where the Boys Are for zeroing in on the hopes and fears with which we regarded our own futures. Our impending college years—still far off but looming large in our imaginations—seemed to promise so much in the way of freedom, self-fulfillment, romantic love. Still, we could sense that there were dangers to be skirted, and the film makes these quite clear.

 It starts with a group of diverse (but, of course, all white) college co-eds heading down from the snowy Midwest to enjoy spring break in Fort Lauderdale, where vacationing collegians abound. Boys, of course, are very much on the minds of the four. The sensible Merritt (Dolores Hart) is quickly attracted to Ivy Leaguer Ryder (George Hamilton). Madcap Tuggle (Paula Prentiss) is delighted to find that TV Thompson (Jim Hutton) is even taller than she is, and shares her wry sense of humor. Pretty blonde Melanie (Yvette Mimieux) falls hard for a Yalie named Franklin. Angie (Connie Francis) has a few laughs with the goofy Basil (Frank Gorshin), but is mostly alone, wistfully warbling, “Where the boys are . . .  someone waits for me.”  

 All these plotlines play out in ways we can predict. The fun and games that are part of this giant courtship dance give way to a more somber tone when Melanie, who has naively agreed to meet Franklin at a local motel, finds herself a rape victim. Dazed and disheveled, she wanders down the highway and is sideswiped by a passing car. Her hospitalization quickly leads her friends to step back from their own romantic adventures. Maturity, they realize, is something to be prized. At the film’s end they’re returning to college, sadder but wiser.

 As they recuperate from their spring fling, lessons have been learned. (I’m sure our parents appreciated the film sending a cautionary message regarding pre-marital sex.) The light-hearted romance of Tuggle and her guy is quickly over (though Prentiss—making her first film—and Hutton had such strong on-screen chemistry that MGM quickly starred them in three romantic comedies). It’s only Hart and Hamilton’s characters who seem to have a solid connection that can make for future happiness.

 The irony, of course, is that Dolores Hart was not destined for marriage. In 1963 she ended her engagement to an L.A. architect to enter a Connecticut convent as a Benedictine nun. Clearly, she was not heading where the boys are. 

 

The Serpent in the Garden: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”

Many scholars agree that the Australian film industry came of age in 1975, when native Aussie Peter Weir directed Picnic at Hanging Rock. This complex psychological thriller—filmed in South Australia with state funds and an Australian cast—became an international success story, though its ambiguity was not to every taste. On the strength of this film and such other Australian projects as Gallipoli (1981), Weir carved out a major career in Hollywood, starting with Witness and including such distinctive features as Dead Poets Society (1989), and The Truman Show (1998)

 From the film’s first few moments, it’s clear that Weir is brilliant at giving a visual flair to his stories. This one, based on a popular Australian novel that hints that the story it tells is true, begins on the morning of Valentine’s Day in the year 1900. We’re in the countryside, at a school for well-bred young ladies, most of whom are thrilled to be going on a rare outing to a natural landmark a few hours away. For the occasion, all are decked out in pristine white dresses (it’s summer in Australia) along with black stockings and shoes. They’ve let down their hair, and for once have been allowed to remove their little white gloves once they near their destination.

 It's a prim group, apparently, though there are hints from the start that some of them are chafing a bit at all the restrictions placed on them by their strict headmistress and her faculty. They may be tightly corseted beneath their summer frocks but their emotions are running wild and free, as we see when they exchange surprisingly passionate Valentine messages. Once they arrive at the distinctive volcanic outcropping known as Hanging Rock, they seem to let down their guard, as do their official chaperones. They’ve been warned not to try to climb the jagged rock formation because of the many dangers it presents, including insects and poisonous snakes. And yet a few of them do set off to explore their surroundings . . . and several are never heard from again. These include Miranda—blonde and pretty—who has been singled out early on as someone sure of her powers and perhaps eager to go her own way. (I kept wondering if her name was chosen in reference to the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, someone excited to discover for herself a “brave new world.”)  

 The mystery of the girls’ disappearance is never solved by the filmmakers, leaving some critics and audiences aghast. Instead the focus is on the reactions of those left behind, survivors who feel pain for a whole host of reasons. There are the missing girls’ classmates, of course, but also the school’s imperious headmistress and her staff, as well as the local policemen who’ve helped with the search and a visiting English gentleman who’d eyed the pretty young ladies before they went missing and becomes almost unhinged after their disappearance. The camera picks up the anguish of all of these folk, but also lingers enticingly on the natural world that stands in such marked contrast to the “civilized” strictures of the upper-class Aussies of that era. We see those snakes, those insects, those dangerous critters that the girls had been warned to avoid. But we see beautiful creatures too, like a majestic swan who glides through the film from time to time, seeming to suggest both purity and proud independence.  

 Picnic at Hanging Rock is a frustrating film for those who like their mysteries solved, but it will haunt me for a long time.

 

 

Looking Back at “Rear Window”

When I was much younger, I always had trouble with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 thriller, Rear Window.  Set in New York’s Greenwich Village, it’s the story of Jeff, a globe-trotting photojournalist (James Stewart), who has broken his leg in the line of duty. Stuck in his tiny upstairs flat, with much too much time on his hands, Jeff has nothing to do but spy on his neighbors, through binoculars, in the apartment building across the way. Critics discuss this film as an exploration of voyeurism, with audience members essentially joining Stewart as Peeping Toms. Some recent feminist scholars have gone further, seeing Rear Window in terms of the notorious “male gaze,” the way movies are designed to reinforce men’s stereotypes about the women they can’t stop watching.  

 My problem with the film was this: I too had endured a broken tibia. In fact, I’d endured two, from ski accidents a year and a half apart. (Yes, I quit skiing thereafter.) So I was sensitive indeed to any inaccuracies about life in a plaster cast. I could well understand Jeff’s restlessness, and appreciated the detail of him desperately trying relieve the itchy skin inside the cast by cautiously inserting a long-handled backscratcher. But! Why was he stuck in a wheelchair throughout the film? Why wasn’t there a pair of crutches around?  Yes, a few weeks in a thigh-to-toe plaster cast can indeed seem like an eternity, but why was Jeff so helpless, and so miserable, when his cast was apparently due to come off a mere seven weeks after the accident, thus implying that the break wasn’t all that drastic? (Try wearing a cast for six months sometime!)  

 Fortunately, my legs are both whole these days (knock wood!), which frees me to appreciate Hitchcock’s work on this clever and  original film. I was not surprised to learn that it was made entirely on the Paramount Studios back lot, with Jeff’s fixed point  of view focused almost entirely on a multi-story apartment building that spreads before him like a stage set. It’s a  midsummer heatwave, which means (in an era before the widespread advent of air conditioning) that life plays out through wide-open windows and on fire escapes. He’s spent so much time observing the building’s inhabitants that he’s given some of them nicknames, like Miss Torso (a curvaceous dancer who seems to have few clothes and a lot of company) and Miss Lonelyhearts (who only pretends to have visitors, and appears on the brink of being  suicidal).

 One neighbor (played by the hulking Raymond Burr) apparently likes growing plants in the building’s small flowerbed, but has no use for his neighbor’s little dog. He also doesn’t seem, from Jeff’s wheelchair-bound perspective, to have the best relationship with his invalid wife. He’s a traveling salesman, so perhaps it’s not odd that he comes and goes at odd hours, carrying a suitcase. But Jeff is quick to cast him as the bad guy in a murder mystery. Is he?

 Jeff’s accomplices in trying to solve this mystery that may or may not exist include a peppery visiting nurse (the always delightful Thelma Ritter) and a gorgeous socialite (Grace Kelly) who’s deeply in love with him. Kelly’s Lisa Fremont makes old-time viewers like me recall what was so great about 1950s fashion.  Lisa claims she’s ready to give up her lavish lifestyle to join Jeff in holy matrimony; he’s skeptical, and perhaps he has reason to be. In the course of this film she shows her underlying pluck, but are they ready for happily ever after? That’s one mystery that Rear Window never solves.

 

Bob Mackie, Naked?

I met Bob Mackie circa 1981, on the fabled MGM studio lot. We were on the set for Herbert Ross’s ambitious musical, Pennies from Heaven, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. They played dreamers who (almost) survive the Great Depression by fantasizing about living lives filled with music, dance, and luxuries like spectacular clothing. Needless to say, this was a dream assignment for Mackie, whose chief claim to fame at the time was his flamboyant duds for TV divas like Carol Burnett and Cher.

 As a big fan of the Carol Burnett Show, I asked the amiable blond Mackie (wearing a polo shirt and looking like a kid) whether he was responsible solely for the lavish gowns in which Burnett greeted her weekly studio audiences. In fact, he explained, he did everything related to costuming for the long-running weekly variety show. This meant bunny suits for the dancers, when needed, and goofy garb for Burnett in her various skits. It turns out—as Burnett herself is quick to admit—that it was Mackie who came up with the crowning sight-gag in a movie parody of Gone With the Wind that got one of the show’s all-time biggest laughs. Burnett plays Scarlett O’Hara, forced to greet a post-war Rhett Butler in a dress hastily crafted from her plantation’s green velvet curtains. When she wafts down Tara’s majestic staircase, viewers can’t help guffawing: her home-made gown still retains its original curtain rod.

 Burnett is one of many celebs interviewed by Matthew Miele for his lively 2024 documentary, Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion. Its title refers to the tantalizingly sheer sheath gowns designed by Mackie first for Mitzi Gaynor and eventually for Cher, who—with her scintillatingly slender figure—has been perhaps his ultimate muse. His glittery gowns hint at nudity but leave the wearer’s private areas discreetly covered, though oh so sexy. For Mackie, all this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t glitz is fun to design, and has led him to costume everyone from Vegas show girls to Barbie. Another of his more unusual clients in Elton John, who encouraged Mackie’s outrageous side, allowing him to come up with a Donald Duck ensemble and an Amadeus-style frock coat, as well as a sequined baseball uniform for a sold-out concert at Dodger Stadium.

 It's clear that Mackie adores pretty women (and pretty men like RuPaul), but in fact he seems to like pretty much everyone. The documentary carefully hints at his sexual orientation, but also shows homey scenes of the now-eighty-plus-year-old Mackie (grey-haired but still boyish) cozily hanging out with his recently-discovered granddaughter and her children on a sunny patio. (His son Robin, a Hollywood make-up artist, died in 1993 at age 33 after an apparently turbulent life.) Though he dresses top stars, Mackie seems wholly comfortable—even overjoyed—to be dressing conservatively and blending into family surroundings.

 Mackie’s talent for glamour has earned him fame and fortune, as well as many accolades from his peers. (The film opens with him modestly accepting myriad awards from fellow designers and critics.) But the top Hollywood honors have eluded him. He has three long-ago Oscar nominations—for Lady Sings the Blues, Funny Lady, and Pennies from Heaven. In the documentary, Carol Burnett expresses outrage that the 1982 Oscar for costume design went not to Pennies from Heaven but to the year’s big film, Chariots of Fire. In this well-crafted period Olympic Games drama, veteran designer Milena Canonero’s cast mostly wear track suits that look like long underwear. Ah well! I guess no one can win them all. 

 

Hail and farewell to Mitzi Gaynor, an early Bob Mackie muse, who has just died at age 93