Sniffing The Rose

Though I’m a Baby Boomer in good standing, I was never much for rock concerts. I never saw Janis Joplin perform live, and I never (until last night) saw The Rose, the 1979 Joplin-inspired film that became the auspicious big-screen debut of Bette Midler. Yes, I knew the powerful title song, and I was certainly familiar with some of the big names in the cast, including Alan Bates as Rose’s hard-assed manager and Harry Dean Stanton as the surly singer-songwriter who puts her in her place. But I went into this film with a certain skepticism about watching yet another movie about a rocker coping with personal demons (see, for instance, the 2018 Freddy Mercury biopic starring an Oscar-winning Rami Malek). One big difference: the character of Rose is female, with all that implies about being a gifted but deeply impressionable woman in what is very much a man’s world.

 So what did I think of The Rose? I was dazzled, as almost everyone has been, by Midler’s powerfully unhinged lead performance. (She was Oscar-nominated, but lost to Sally Field as Norma Rae.) As directed by the talented Mark Rydell, himself a former Juilliard-trained jazz musician, the other actors were strong too. But I admit I was somewhat frustrated by Bo Goldman’s screenplay, which—though giving us an intimate look at the life of a touring rock star—never really explored the forces that had turned Mary Rose Foster into the talented but troubled rock star she was.

 For me perhaps the most gratifying viewing came courtesy of the second disc in my library copy of The Rose. In an interview filmed for the Criterion Collection release of The Rose in 2015, Bette Midler herself (looking none the worse for wear) candidly explained how she came to identify with a fierce on-stage performer who was not wholly unlike herself. She particularly praised costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge for providing her with floaty, sparkly garments—many of them rose-colored—that captured the character’s dynamic onstage aura. Director Mark Rydell  explained to an interviewer how his own musical background contributed to the making of this film. (Rydell, who died just a few weeks ago at the age of 97, was also responsible for directing such stellar flicks as Cinderella Liberty and On Golden Pond.) Wanting to truly capture what he called “the strain and pain of performing,” Rydell insisted to his studio bosses that his leading lady be an actual singer, not a great actress like Jane Fonda equipped with a dubbed singing voice.

 But my favorite interviewee was cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who talked at length about his stylized use of light and perspective. The several outdoor concert scenes in the film were shot with the help of some 6000 extras (who were instructed by Rydell not to clap wildly for Midler’s Rose unless she had truly won them over). To capture the onstage performances at one go, Zsigmond enlisted such ace cinematographers as Conrad Hall and Haskell Wexler to show up and help shoot the concert footage from their own chosen perspective, while cameraman David Myers, a veteran of rock ‘n’ roll documentaries, provided his own take on the onstage action.

 Though the film’s concert scenes are indeed spectacular,  Zsigmond and his interviewer (the cinematographer John Bailey) also pointed to a dynamic cinematographic moment in which Midler as Rose cruises through a gay men’s bathhouse. There’s also the essential twilight scene in which Rose—ensconced in a telephone booth at the edge of her hometown’s darkened football field—makes a fateful decision that will change her life.