The movie that forced me to boycott American Movie Classics. Not that I should’ve been giving them my time to begin with; once the commercials came in, it was inevitable that they would start editing for content. But when they announced it in front of Prophecy (resulting in its immediate deletion from the TiVo), I figured they always said as much. But after doing some research on this obscure flick, I was surprised to discover that there’s a whole lotta nudity going on, and thanks to AMC, I was none the wiser. Sorry, AMC, but I get cable to see hippie pagan orgies, thank you very much.
So anyway, the movie: it’s basically Altman’s Images, only with Susannah York replaced with Robert Culp (!). He’s an architect who leaves the big city with his wife to inhabit his grandfather’s decrepit house in the woods. Like Images, it’s upfront that the protagonist sees things that are only in his head; a slight difference is that Culp seems to know the difference, at least in the beginning. However, his grandfather’s ghost may be haunting the place; or it may be Culp’s imagination; or it could be the ambiguous direction and cinematography just trying to confuse us as to what the hell’s going on; or it’s possible that a plot point got lost cuz there was a boob in the shot. It’s difficult to say, and thus the 58 is provisional, since I don’t know what to blame on Girard and what to blame on AMC.
Despite this, I liked this intriguing mess of a movie. Culp is really good; his architect’s a depressed guy with an active fantasy life, and Culp, a pretty masculine guy, seems to be enjoying playing such a withdrawn and emotionally fragile character. As Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies points out, movies about insane men usually portray the insanity through violence, while movies about insane women seem to have the option of using (a usually pastoral) location to represent the decaying mind. This is the only film I know that switches the gender roles in this way.
The beginning is energetically bizarre, as well: Culp quits his firm, but the conversation between him and his boss is heard only in voice-over, over images of the skyscrapers (presumably that Culp designs) that dominate the landscape. He then leaves, and through a series of shots, we see the city and the urban lifestyle gang up on him (including a automatic pool sweeper!), culminating in him throwing his TV out his high-rise apartment window. Frankly, it’s as good an indictment of the modern world as anything in Richard Lester’s Petulia.
The rest of the movie isn’t up to this beginning, but it does squeeze out a few more interesting moments until Culp’s final crack-up, including a hallucinatory hippie pagan romp that borders on Wicker Man creepiness. Except that its logical climax, the aforementioned orgy, is cut. Fuckin’ AMC.
Where we saw it: tv | We deign to rate it: outta 100