"Unorthodox": Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Today I suspect most of us—isolating ourselves at home to escape the Corona virus—have discovered a desperate longing to visit our barbers and hairdressers, Wouldn’t it be nice to settle back in that comfy chair for a wash and a trim? Naturally, I can’t help thinking about movies in which haircuts play a key role.

As a social setting, a hair salon can be an important gathering spot, both in real life and at the movies. The urban black community, in particular, seems to love its barbershops, as seen in a series of comic Barbershop movies, as well as in Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America. The notion of small-town white Southern women looking to the local beauty parlor as the locus of their lives finds dramatic expression in Steel Magnolias, where everyone knows and sympathizes with everyone else’s woes.

Right now, though, we don’t have the luxury of congregating in a world of swivel chairs, mirrors, hot towels, and clippers. Some guys tired of looking Neanderthal might be tempted to explore getting rid of the problem entirely by shaving their heads. As Yul Brynner and Woody Strode once showed us, bald can be sexy—at least if we’re talking about those of the male persuasion.

Bald women, though, not so much. It occurs to me that there are many dramatic films which use the cutting of a woman’s long tresses as a climactic moment. There’s something almost unspeakably poignant about watching a woman be transformed by the loss of her locks. Usually such scenes suggest the degradation of a hapless female by those who hold power over her body and her soul. Like, for instance, Nazis. The 1980 TV film Playing for Time is based on the memoir of French-born Fania Fénelon, a Jewish concert pianist who saved her life by performing for her captors in a female orchestra. Vanessa Redgrave was widely considered brave for allowing her hair to be shaved off in order to authentically represent an Auschwitz inmate. More recently, Anne Hathaway, portraying a fallen woman in pre-Revolutionary France, had her dark locks hacked off on camera in 2012’s Les Misérables. Submitting to the brutal shearing helped win her an Oscar for best supporting actress. 

Rosemary’s Baby contains a haircut of a different kind. At the beginning of Roman Polanski’s 1968 theological chiller, Mia Farrow’s Rosemary wears her hair longish. But as her difficult pregnancy advances, she gets the bright idea of updating her personal style. When she leaves the beautician’s chair, we see a gaunt young woman with a huge belly and a chic but severe crop of hair (design by Vidal Sassoon) that hugs her face, accentuating her delicate features. More than anything, she looks like a sacrificial lamb ready to be led to the slaughter. (And yes, she also resembles the great Falconetti, whose 1929 silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, puts front and center a young woman with a cropped head and a haunted look. Said filmmaker Jean Renoir in admiration, “That shaven head was and remains the abstraction of the whole epic of Joan of Arc.”)

Recently I watched a four-part Netflix miniseries called Unorthodox, drawn from the memoir of a young woman who broke away from a strict Hassidic community in Brooklyn to start a new life. Just before her wedding day, nineteen-year-old Esty submits to the shaving off of all her long hair. Henceforth, as a married woman, she’ll only be seen in a wig . The  on-camera shaving of her head, though done to celebrate a marriage, seems as brutal as a rape.

 Dedicated to the memory of Woody Strode Jr. (aka Kalai Strode). All former guides at the U.S. Pavilion, Expo ’70, will understand why.

In the Family Way: “Moonstruck”

I wonder what genuine Italian-Americans think of Moonstruck, which in 1987 was a huge critical and popular hit. Do they consider it a charming, heartwarming representation of a vanishing way of life? Or do they cringe at the clichés, annoyed at being presented to the world as superstitious, hyperemotional, in love with food, sex, and opera? Maybe they’re just glad that this fanciful version of life in an Italian section of Brooklyn--while it may boast some (offscreen) lusty coupling and a smidgeon of adultery—contains nary a single Mafioso. Not being of Italian descent myself, I am free to enjoy this fairytale (which, I should note, is based on an Oscar-winning original screenplay by John Patrick Shanley, who is no more Italian than I am).

There is, I should note, a mostly Italian-American cast, featuring Vincent Gardenia as a philandering papa, Broadway avant-garde specialist Julie Bovasso as a lusty aunt, and the late Danny Aiello as a hapless suitor. The leading man is Nicolas Cage, who is actually a Coppola with a name change. But the film’s two performance Oscars were won by women whose kinfolk came from other locales. Cher (born Cherilyn Sarkisian) can claim Armenian descent, and Olympia Dukakis is Greek-American. Well, I guess their Mediterranean roots make them close enough for Hollywood.

At any rate, their characters are definitely people with a well-defined outlook. They strongly believe in luck, mostly bad. (Cher’s Loretta started off her marriage on the wrong foot because there was no church wedding. As a direct consequence, her husband was hit by a bus and died.) Whatever their behavior during the week, these women go to confession on Sunday. They crave romantic rapture, but remain highly suspicious of it: to marry for love is to invite disappointment. Still, there’s always room for the occasional miracle, like the one in faraway Palermo that solves everyone’s problems at the film’s end. So long as that huge round moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie (as in the Dean Martin musical oldie that opens and closes the film), everything will turn out as it should.

You can call this movie a watered-down form of grand opera: the snippet of Puccini’s La Bohème we hear in Moonstruck captures something of the characters’ baroque emotional journeys. Though the operatic performance that’s a key part of the plot takes place at WASP-y Lincoln Center, it tugs directly at the heartstrings of the blue-collar Italians in attendance. (There’s a key moment when Loretta, overcome by her first taste of opera, breaks down her emotional barriers. Her eyes moisten, and suddenly this self-sufficient woman is ready to clutch the proffered hand of someone who loves her This night-at-the-opera trope was stolen, I suspect, by the writers of Pretty Woman, who created a similarly transformative moment for Julia Roberts, in the company of Richard Gere, three years later.) 

More than anything, though, Moonstruck is a movie about the unbreakable bonds of family. To cast off (or cast out) a family member is to invite disaster. On the other hand, to bring family together (especially around a dinner table stocked with plenty of pasta and wine) is to usher in God’s grace. At a time when most of us are stuck in self-isolation, sometimes separated by great distances from loved ones, it sounds like a dream come true to be crowded around a table groaning with the weight of good food. Would that this year’s Easter and Passover celebrations could allow for that “all in the family” kind of joy.

Roger Corman and the Pandemic Bandwagon

I don’t know what Roger Corman is doing right now, as he approaches his 94^th birthday weekend. I hope he is self-isolating, along with the loyal Julie, in the Santa Monica home that was part of the nasty legal dispute with the two Corman sons. That dispute is apparently settled at last,  as I’ve learned through a legal site specializing in showbiz matters. And I’d like to think that Roger—true to his nature—is busy planning out a quick and dirty flick that captures this peculiar moment in time.

We are, of course, in the midst of a pandemic, the likes of which the world has never seen. Roger has made at least two plague movies, versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting (and prescient) “Masque of the Red Death.” Roger himself directed the Vincent Price version from 1964, which also starred the memorable Hazel Court as well as pretty Jane Asher, who was Paul McCartney’s main squeeze at the time. The film was shot in London, where the Brits know all about period filmmaking, and the cinematographer was a future directorial great, Nicolas Roeg. I had no part in that production, but was deeply involved with Larry Brand’s 1989 remake, which features a sad and eerie peasant striptease led by Corman favorite Maria Ford in a remarkable T&A moment that Poe doubtless never imagined.

Though the two “Masque” productions are rather effective, they were both made at times when a pandemic seemed, frankly, unthinkable. Still, Roger’s particular genius over the years has been to seize the moment, recognizing topics of high interest to the movie-going public and then hustling them out as quickly as possible. Such was the case with The War of the Satellites, a threadbare 1958 space epic launched immediately after the Soviet Union’s Sputnik had the whole world agog about space travel. Back in the 1950s, Roger was so artistically nimble—and so well established in the nation’s drive-ins and grind houses—that he could write, cast, film, and edit a quickie capturing the moment, then have it in theatres in a matter of weeks. By the late 1960s he was slightly more ambitious, taking it on himself to tackle the big events of the day (such as youth rebellion, biker gangs, psychedelics) in films like The Wild Angels, The Trip, and his AIP swan song, Gas-s-s-s!  The last of these, ironically enough, posits a pandemic, one that kills everybody over the age of 25. Uh oh!

In my own era at Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, movies took a bit longer to make and to distribute. And we were less concerned with dramatizing the events of the day than with jumping on the bandwagon of other filmmakers. I heard how, in response to the success of the first Star Wars, we ‘d built a studio and shot our own special-effects-heavy space drama, Battle Beyond the Stars. And Steven Spielberg’s Jaws led directly to our Piranha. I didn’t work on either of those (though I’ve spoken to many Corman alumni who did). But I was certainly around when dinosaur movies became a thing. While Spielberg was still shooting Jurassic Park, Roger set us to making our own flick about raptors running amok in the modern world. We bought a shoddy British novel and kept nothing but the title, Carnosaur. The goal was to beat Jurassic Park into theatres, which we did with weeks to spare. Between Siskel and Ebert, we got one thumb up. Today I’m giving a thumbs-up to Roger for his birthday celebration, and wondering what movie comes next out of his still-fertile brain.