Imploding in Atlantic City

Moral ambiguity is a quality that director Louis Malle knows very well. Maybe this has something to do with his awareness, as a part-Jewish child at a Catholic boarding school, of a 1943 Nazi raid that sent a close friend and a teacher to Auschwitz. (The memory ultimately led to Malle’s monumental 1987 film, Au Revoir, les Enfants.) Though most of his movies were made in France, he tried his hand at America-set dramas too, including 1981’s My Dinner with Andre. Malle’s most notorious American movie is surely Pretty Baby (1978), in which a eleven-year-old Brooke Shields plays a child prostitute in 1917 New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder. But he received major awards nominations for his next film, 1980’s Atlantic City, which became perhaps star Burt Lancaster’s last major film role.

 The snowy-haired Lancaster plays Lou, a small-time crook hunkered down in a rapidly decaying resort town where classic hotels are being imploded to make room for modern gambling casinos. Though Lou likes to boast about when he and Bugsy Siegel were prison cellmates, he makes a living—such as it is—as a numbers runner in a poor part of town, while also serving as full-time valet and part-time bedwarmer to a neighbor, a bedraggled former beauty queen who’s the widow of a mobster type. His only true pleasure, it seems, is spying on another neighbor, the luscious Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works at an oyster bar by day and sponges off her body with a freshly cut lemon come evening time.

 Pretty soon, Sally’s world will be rocked by the reappearance of a Canadian ex-husband, Dave, who shows up with her hugely pregnant sister and a whole cache of stolen cocaine. Before long, Dave will be pulling Lancaster’s amiable Lou into his orbit while he tries to make a lucrative drug sale. But of course some really bad guys are soon after Dave: there’s a marvelous chase scene, followed by a murder.

 From there, things get truly complicated. Sally and Lou draw closer together, while he enjoys spending on her the drug money the mobsters didn’t manage to collect from Dave. But ultimately, the thugs are still out there, looking for a big payday.  I won’t go into what happens, other than to say that Lou—a fascinating mix of generosity and self-preservation—ultimately makes a heroic gesture, while at the same time reveling in an unfamiliar sense of his own powers   as a tough guy. It’s a marvelously nuanced Lancaster performance, delivered when he was almost 70 and well past the athletic vigor of earlier star turns like his Oscar-winning role in Elmer Gantry. And Sarandon (only five years after her ingenue role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) matches him with a portrayal that is fierce,  poignant, and sensuous.  At the close of the film we wish them both well, but aren’t quite clear about where either one of them will land. Both were Oscar-nominated for their portrayals, as was Malle as director, but this was the year of Chariots of Fire and On Golden Pond.

 Curiously, despite Atlantic City’s very American setting, it was not technically a U.S. film, but rather a French and Canadian co-production. (Outside of the leads, most of the performers hailed from Canada, like Kate Reid as the blowsy onetime beauty queen and a mesmerizing Robert Joy as the manic ex-husband.) Still, the film has enjoyed a rare All-American accolade. In 2003 it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, so I guess it belongs to all of us now.

 

 

Brooke Shields and her Mother: Losing it at the Movies

When the death of Teri Shields was announced late last month, the flurry of obituary tributes subsided quickly. After all, she had been out of the public eye for decades, ever since Brooke Shields stopped permitting her mother to guide her acting career. Since at least 2009, Teri Shields had been struggling with dementia, which contributed to her death at age 79.

It was a sad end for a woman who once seemed to have the world by the tail, thanks to her willingness to exploit her very young daughter’s beauty. Teri and her husband divorced a few months after Brooke was born in 1965. As a single parent, Teri was determined to make her own way in the world. She found a lucrative career through her baby daughter, whose first paying gig (at 11 months) was an ad for Dove soap.

Teri Shields was soon shrewdly aware of her daughter’s striking combination of innocence and sexual potential. Acting as Brooke’s manager, she arranged for her ten-year-old to be photographed in the nude for a Playboy Press publication. Two years later, Brooke was cast in Pretty Baby. This 1978 film, a serious look at the brothels of New Orleans in the early years of the 20th century, had an impressive pedigree. Director Louis Malle, a pillar of French cinema, was making his American film debut; story and screenplay were the work of the multi-talented Polly Platt, one of the many Roger Corman alumni who went on to earn impressive Hollywood credentials. Sven Nykvist’s cinematography was gorgeous. Performances by Keith Carradine (as a lovesick photographer) and newcomer Susan Sarandon were appealing. But what everyone remembers about Pretty Baby is twelve-year-old Brooke Shields, stark naked, in the central role of a child prostitute whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder.

As a mother myself, I wonder how a parent could push such a young child into such a sexualized environment. A few years after Pretty Baby’s release, Teri calmly told a TV interviewer, “Fortunately, Brooke was at an age where she couldn't talk back.” Brooke’s best-known films from her teen years also involved sexual discovery: The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981). And of course there was the notorious TV ad for Calvin Klein jeans, shot when she was fifteen, in which Brooke looks straight into the camera and proclaims, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” (When she graduated from Princeton in 1987, her senior thesis was apparently titled, “The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, Pretty Baby and Lacombe Lucien.” It was certainly a subject she knew something about.)

Teri Shields, quintessential stage mother, was by no means unique. When I was writing for The Hollywood Reporter, I researched a piece on children who are cast in films that contain mature situations. Though the parents I spoke to worried about their youngsters growing up too fast, I have a hunch that many of them would jump if a juicy part came their child’s way.

The eeriest conversation I had for that article was with young Jena Malone, who’d starred as a victim of sexual abuse in a hard-hitting 1996 TV movie, Bastard Out of Carolina. When the role became available, Jena didn’t wait for her mother’s approval. By all accounts unusually bright and mature, she herself read and absorbed the tough-minded script. That an eleven-year-old could talk knowingly about sexual molestation, and would want to simulate it on camera, is something that the mom in me would rather not accept.