The Very Flexible Diane Keaton

In memory of the late Diane Keaton, I wanted to re-watch one of her films. But which one? Of course I remembered her hilarious teaming with Woody Allen in so many of his early flicks. I can still see the two of them in Sleeper (1973), elaborately pretending to be surgeons charged with cloning an assassinated political leader from his one remaining body part: a nose.  I’m also very partial to Love and Death (1975) and of course Keaton is justly adored for her Oscar-winning title role in the ultimate romantic comedy, Annie Hall (1977).

 In truth I fell for Keaton in her very first film: Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). In this charming ensemble outing, set amid the chaos of a big family wedding, she has the small role of Joan Vecchio, married to the groom’s older brother. Her appearance causes some tension at the festive gathering, because she and husband Richie are seriously thinking of separating. The problem: Joan has discovered that, after several years of wedlock, Richie’s hair no longer smells like raisins.

 Of course Keaton was later to play other wedding scenes, notably in The Godfather, where she was Michael Corleone’s naïve young wife-to-be, meeting the family at the lavish nuptials of Michael’s sister . But as she aged she hardly lost her on-screen sex appeal. In 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, a wealthy playboy (Jack Nicholson) gives up an attractive young woman in order to woo her mother, played by Keaton, who was then almost 60. Still, the course of true love never does run smooth. In a 1996 comedy, The First Wives Club, Keaton (who in real life never married) is one of a trio of reluctant divorcees determined to get revenge on the husbands who dumped them for much younger cuties.

 Though Keaton was known for her flair for comedy, she also played highly dramatic roles. In 1977, the same year in which the world fell in love with her Annie Hall, she starred as a secretly promiscuous schoolteacher who meets a tragic fate in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Four years later, she starred with Warren Beatty in Reds, an Oscar-winning epic saga of the Russian Revolution as seen through the eyes of real-life American activists John Reed and Louise Bryant. But I decided to re-visit Keaton by way of a much smaller drama. Released in 1996, it was called Marvin’s Room. And, like Reds, it earned Keaton an Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actress.

 If Keaton’s Louise Bryant in Reds was heroic, her Bessie in Marvin’s Room is downright saintly. (That’s a new one for me—Diane Keaton as a saint!) In this story of a medical crisis that brings s fractured family together, Meryl Streep is the bitchy Lee, unhappily raising two misfit kids by herself ever since her no-good husband walked out. (One of her sons, a teenaged Leonardo DiCaprio, has just burned her house down.) She’s received word that her younger sister Bessie (Keaton) has been diagnosed with cancer and desperately needs a bone marrow donor. So Lee and the kids reluctantly drive from Ohio to Florida to help out a relative with whom Lee has had no contact for 20 years.

 Keaton’s Bessie, who lost her first love to an accident many years back, has spent decades of her life looking after her bed-ridden father (Hume Cronyn) and her wacky aunt (an unrecognizable Gwen Verdon). Despite the physical challenge she herself is facing, she has a radiant optimism about the days ahead. In service to others, she finds joy, and we believe every word she says. 

 

Physically and Emotionally Naked: Remembering Sally Kirkland

So, I’m sorry to say, Sally Kirkland is no longer with us.  If, that is, she ever was. My personal feeling is that Sally came from another  planet, and only visited earth occasionally. She was, in any case, one of a kind.

 The highlight of Sally’s acting career was Anna, a 1987 indie in which she played the title role, that of a Slavic actress who has survived political persecution. The showy part won her a Golden Globe, and she was even nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. (Her competition included Glenn Close for Fatal Attraction, Holly Hunter for Broadcast News, Meryl Streep for Ironweed, and the winner, Cher, for Moonstruck.)

 But I knew Sally before all that, when she was one of the many aspiring movie people hanging around the Sunset Strip offices of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. An Actors Studio alumna who had also spent time among Andy Warhol’s The Factory crazies, she helped out with casting, and also played small but flamboyant roles like “Barney’s woman” in Big Bad Mama. She performed in some major studio films too, like The Sting, Private Benjamin, and JFK, mostly in parts that called for big emotions and very few clothes.

 Sally, you see, had a thing for nudity. A former model, she was tall and lean, with augmented breasts. (Years later, she was to become a very public crusader against breast implants.) When I was researching my former boss for the biography that evolved into Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, she told me that on screen she had a gift for appearing both physically and emotionally undressed: “Combining the emotional nakedness with the physical nakedness—that’s something that Roger’s always loved about my work.” 

 The 1999 in-person interview I did with Sally for that book is something I’ll never, ever forget. We met at the Silver Spoon, a trendy West Hollywood coffee shop near her home. When I entered, she (fully dressed) was ensconced in a booth, beneath a large framed movie poster of herself in Anna. And she was not alone. There was a young male assistant sitting beside her, taking notes, and I realized I was expected to buy them both breakfast. She was also the only person I interviewed for the Corman book who required me to sign an agreement allowing her to check all her quotes and context before my book was published. (When I later complied, she kept tinkering with her own brief bio at the rear of the book to make sure pretty much every film she’d ever made was mentioned.)

 We were studying our menus when two very attractive young blondes walked through the door. They were wearing low-cut blouses and short-shorts, and they looked to be identical. Twins? They were, it turned out, Sally’s acting students, and she’d invited them along. And then . . . a third young lady arrived. Yes, triplets. Sally proudly told me that, like her, they’d been featured in a Playboy spread, and that they now—under her tutelage—were getting ready to pursue acting careers. And I discovered I’d be buying breakfast for myself and five other people. (The triplets sat, looking awestruck, as Sally praised Roger to the skies for encouraging her directing aspirations and for treating her like a member of his family.)

 Sally Kirkland was, among many other things, a crusader for a variety of causes. I of course have no way of knowing where she is now. But I’m sure of one thing: wherever she may have ended up, it’s where the action is.

 

 

 

A Tale of Three Swingers: “Trapeze”

When I was a kid, I was entranced by the ads for Trapeze, a circus drama featuring lots of high-flying action and three bona fide Hollywood stars : Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lollobridgida. The sets and spangly costumes looked dazzling to a small girl. I wouldn’t have much cared that the film’s director was Carol Reed, a Brit who’d helmed such taut masterworks as Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949). (In 1968 he was to have his big Hollywood moment, winning the Best Director Oscar for his work on a delightful film musical, Oliver!)

 Flash forward to 2025. After watching 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, produced in part by Burt Lancaster’s own company, I read that Tony Curtis was cast as the ambitious young press agent kowtowing to Lancaster’s sinister gossip columnist largely because Lancaster had enjoyed working with Curtis on Trapeze. So, thanks to the goodly supply of vintage films on DVD at my local library, the time seemed right to check it out.

 The story of Trapeze is simple enough: every character is in love with the drama and the spectacle of the circus. This particular troupe is based in Paris, and boasts the usual combination of clowns, animals, dancing girls, and acrobats. We immediately get to the heart of things as aerialist Mike Ribble (a buff-looking Lancaster) climbs to the rafters to swing into a daring triple somersault. Once he’s performed the dangerous stunt, he’s supposed to be caught by the waiting hands of a second trapeze artist. But something goes awry, and he falls, bouncing out of the safety net and onto the ground. All of this happens before the opening credits: when we next see Mike he’s an embittered man, working for the circus as a rigger and effortfully walking with a cane. 

Along comes Tony Curtis as brash, bouncy Tino Orsini, American son of an old-school aerialist. He’s heard that Mike is the only flyer in the world who can teach him the triple somersault. Refusing to accept Mike’s rejection, he uses his talents and his easy charm to worm his way into the older man’s heart. (One of the film’s most endearing moments shows the two walking down a Paris street. The irrepressible Tino upends his body to continue walking on his hands. That’s when Mike, not willing to be totally upstaged by his new protégé, does the same. The scene fades out on the two of them, side by side, traversing the Paris trottoir upside down.)  Tino wants to learn; and Mike discovers he wants to teach. What could be better? 

 But of course there has to be a fly in the ointment. And Lola, as played by Italian “it” girl Gina Lollobrigida, is a pretty fly indeed. Originally the only female on a team of Italian acrobats, she slithers her way into the aerial act by using her sex appeal to alternately romance both Tino and Mike. Of course it all comes to a head on the night when American impresario John Ringling North is visiting, looking for acts to import.

 Frankly, I was rather disappointed by the big aerial climax when, without a net, the triple somersault is once again attempted. After all the build-up, I’d expected something far more spectacular. But the film has an effectively rueful ending in which some achieve greatness and some turn it down. Lancaster and Curtis once again make a memorable team. As for the busty, glamorous Lollobrigida, I couldn’t really decipher what her character was about. Maybe, simply, a combination of Eve and the serpent. 

 

Fanning the Flames: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

 Portrait of a Lady on Fire: what a scintillating title! Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French-language historical drama was originally called Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, which sounds almost as good. But the English-language version allows for an interesting mental connection to a Henry James classic from 1881, The Portrait of a Lady. In that novel, one of James’ most admired, young Isabel Archer is a feisty American who attracts several European suitors, but turns them down because she’s  determined to preserve her independence. Ultimately, though, she marries an American expatriate . . . only to find that he’s a schemer, and totally unworthy of her affections.

 James’ novel has a lot to say about love and marriage, but it never enters into the territory that Sciamma broaches in this fascinating and beautifully photographed film. Set in the late 18^th century or thereabouts, it begins with an art instructor (Noémie Merlant). Facing a classroom full of eager young girls, she ruefully admits that a painting one of them has unearthed in a storeroom is her long-ago work. Its title: Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Flashback to decades earlier, when the same woman-- traveling via a small rowboat to an island off the coast of Brittany—leaps into the choppy water to rescue some of her work that has been washed overboard.

 Marianne, self-confident and determined, has been summoned by a French countess to produce a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse, who’s on the brink of marriage to a wealthy Milanese nobleman. The assignment is a tricky one. Héloïse was mostly reared in a convent; it was her older sister who was destined to marry. But that sister is now dead—a suicide?—and so Héloïse (Adèle Haenel)  is being groomed to be given away in marriage in her place. Héloïse is a fascinating character; our sense is that she’s as of yet unformed: she doesn’t quite seem to know who she is or what she wants. She does know, though, that she does NOT want to pose for a commemorative portrait. And so the plan is for the talented Marianne to befriend her and then paint her portrait in secret, using herself (in Héloïse’s gown) as a model for the painting’s upper body.

 The friendship thrives, and then – in the countess’s brief absence—becomes something far more. The two young women discover that a deep sexual bond exists between them. There’s a dazzling bonfire scene on a local beach that seems to reflect their passion, and the moment of Héloïse’s long skirts catching fire hints at both the ardor and the danger of their burgeoning relationship. There’s also a provocative scene in a local peasant hut where the housemaid in the countess’s chateau matter-of-factly undergoes an abortion, with the abortionist’s own very young children nestled by her side. 

 I won’t give away what ultimately happens between Héloïse and Marianne, though the film gives us several interesting glimpses of their future lives. Suffice it to say that the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice plays a key emotional role in what ultimately transpires. Sciamma, clearly a master filmmaker, makes creative use of music both old (Summer, from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”) and new (a haunting a cappella number for female choir and rhythmic clapping). 

Portrait of a Lady on Fire was nominated for countless awards, and won many. At its Cannes debut, it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, and won for Sciamma’s screenplay. As a filmmaker devoted to the female gaze, Sciamma was doubtless pleased to have won the Queer Palm as well.