Pucker Up and Get Ready for Some Lipstick!

Resting uncomfortably between the areas of tawdry exploitation and howling campfest (and all the while disguised as an earnest examination of the victimization of women), Lipstick, the 1976 answer to ‘74’s Death Wish tickles as many people as it terrifies, mostly due to its ultra-slick handling and its very tacky script.

Margaux Hemingway (the real life granddaughter of legendary writer Ernest Hemingway) makes her film debut as successful model Chris McCormick, the primary face of a major ad campaign selling liver spot vanishing cream. (That’s a joke! Naturally, the woman is selling lipstick. To be honest, eyebrow pencil would also not have been far off the mark either, though!) A wide assortment of clothes and hairstyles are demonstrated on her during the opening credits. She is the guardian of younger sister Kathy (played by her own real life younger sister Mariel Hemingway, also making her debut.) In order to avoid confusion, I will henceforth refer to the Hemingway gals by their first names.
When Mariel invites her favorite teacher, the friendly, but slightly meek, Chris Sarandon, to one of Margaux’s photo shoots so that he might share some of his original music with her, it sets off a series of nasty events. He comes to the beach where she is swarmed by attendants, assistants and stylists and can barely make time for a quick hello. He is forced to take his portable cassette player and go with the promise of a second meeting at her apartment.

(Incidentally, I’d like to know if it was intentional or not that Mariel and Sarandon are swathed in clothing that is precisely the same color as the craggy background! If it wasn’t done on purpose – as some sort of warped notion that they are bland people who blend into the scenery in the presence of the more colorful supermodel – then it was really careless costuming.)

Sarandon creates his “music” by recording the sounds of anything from heartbeats to cooing pigeons to (probably) turds dropping into the toilet and then amplifying and mixing it all together into a cacophony of sheer aural hell, which he is nonetheless proud of. Visiting her high-rise apartment, which we are permitted to scan in a lengthy tracking shot, so that we can see how her abode is dotted with personally autographed photos from Warren Beatty and Paul Newman and a shot of her with Cary Grant, he brings along his tape player again and nervously prepares to play it for her. He is under the impression that she can use her connections to get it played before the right industry people.
Unfortunately, she has completely forgotten that he is even coming by and is not even dressed when he arrives. Damp from a shower and in a terry cloth robe, she invites him to have a beer while she changes into a tan muumuu. He catches a glimpse of her while she’s changing, adding to the uneasiness he’s feeling at being in her presence. As he plays the “music” for her, it is evident pretty quickly that she equates it (as I do!) with the sound of someone taking a bottle cap and scratching it back and forth on a chalkboard. The tape has barely started when she is rescued by the ringing telephone and she rudely takes the call, even asking him to hang up the extension while she drifts off into her room to chat with her boyfriend!

Sarandon’s mask of humility soon drops and he begins to assert himself to her, crushing a picture of her (priest) brother and making lots of nasty talk. Soon, he’s shoving her around, demanding to know where her lipstick is. It gets uglier and uglier as he tosses her to and fro, smashing closet doors and mirrors, forcing her to apply the reddest lipstick he can find. Finally, in a memorably harrowing scene, he ties her up and forces himself on her (as the story dictates, anally) while she screams in pain and humiliation.

Fourteen year-old Mariel comes home from school and mistakenly believes that her sister and her teacher have made love, though she is quickly convinced of otherwise once Sarandon makes his escape and Mariel gets a good look at Margaux. Margaux, who is used to being photographed over and over, gets to pose for a police photographer as he blithely snaps shots of her in all her degradation.

The girls drive off to visit their brother John Bennett Perry at his church where Margaux discusses her traumatic experience with him and Mariel confides to a nun that she feels responsible for her parents’ death in a car accident on the way to pick her up years before and now her sister’s assault as well, as she was the one who brought Sarandon into their lives.
Next is a visit to frank, tough, district attorney Carla Bondi (played by Anne Bancroft.) Bancroft lays it all on the line for Margaux, about how she will likely be violated all over again by an insensitive and probing court of law. Margaux’s boyfriend Perry King (in a dire, miniscule and unimportant role) promises to stand by her if she presses charges. Bancroft wants to make sure that the victim can withstand severe cross-examination and prods her until she unleashes one of the all-time bad bits of movie dialogue:

Chris: “He wanted to kill me with it!”
D.A. Bondi: “With what?”
Chris: “His COCK!”

That settled, the cast nestles in for a lengthy courtroom battle with predictably smarmy defense attorney Robin Gammell trying to poke holes in Margaux’s story. Bancroft takes on a brittle, unyielding stance, but the script doesn’t give her much to stand on. Somehow Sarandon is able to insinuate that Margaux wanted the rape to happen to her out of a sadomasochistic perversion of hers and (apparently) also wanted her closet doors smashed, her bathroom mirrors shattered and her brother’s photo crushed and broken?

That she’s a model who plugs lipstick in sexy ads seems to be enough to convince the jury that she is always open to anything and brought the rape on herself, regardless of the documented physical harm she endured during it. The extended trial plods on and on with young Mariel being a key witness. Her initial sense of what happened that day is turned against Margaux, even though Mariel strenuously exclaims that she was wrong.

Sarandon torments Margaux by calling her in the middle of the night (while naked) and playing his lovely, tuneful concoctions over the phone line. This being 1976, such modern day crime solving tools such as DNA are nowhere to be found, nor, apparently, were police able to trace the records of phone calls clearly made from his home to hers? She is never shown so much as mentioning this to anyone.

When Sarandon goes free, it looks like Margaux’s career is about to dry up, though she has a couple of photo shoots left in her. Sarandon, on the other hand, is thriving. Yes, he lost his job at the school where Mariel was a student, but the nuns (including one played by Benson’s Inga Swenson!) want him back as soon as possible! Meanwhile, he’s keeping busy with his “music” that is part of a laser and dance exhibition, an enterprise that, naturally, involves young female dance students. The viewer is put through a rehearsal for his extravaganza that is an assault on the eyes and ears. Through a convenient turn of events, this rehearsal is taking place at the newly constructed Beverly Center Mall, where Margaux is posing for another advertising promotion! Not only that, but Mariel has wandered up through the mostly deserted building to the spot where Sarandon is emphatically exercising his musical muscles.

When Mariel foolishly comes into contact with Sarandon, a decision she quickly regrets, Margaux comes unglued and runs, in her spectacularly red, sequined gown with chiffon wrap, out to her car to grab a hunting rifle, which she then trains on the unsuspecting Sarandon who is attempting to drive out of the parking lot. Suffice it to say that there’s a pat, rather unbelievable conclusion that involves prosecutor Bancroft suddenly switching to defense attorney!
The film, which, in truth, looks like it was made later than it was, with almost an early ‘80s feel, was positively lambasted upon release. Considered revoltingly tasteless and sleazy, its few merits were almost completely overlooked with the exception of young Mariel Hemingway, whose sensitive, emotional, natural and surprisingly adept work won her more than a few fans among critics.

The screenplay appears to have either been put together with little thought or else butchered either during shooting or editing. The entire theme of the church goes nowhere. Perry’s role of the priest is superfluous and ultimately has no bearing on anything. There seems to be an attempt to somehow key in religion to all of this, but it never comes together. The Hemingway girls have a priest brother and turn to him and his nuns briefly, but Sarandon is a parochial teacher and has nuns on his side, too. What does it all mean?

The film seems more about depicting the act of rape than exploring what such a crime really does to a person. Margaux, except for one little bit of hesitancy, scarcely misses a beat in resuming her modeling career despite what it meant to her loss in the courtroom. Mariel’s motivation in resuming contact with Sarandon is not sufficiently explained. Unfortunately, it’s just a glossy thriller with precious little substance or even, at times, reality. This is, of course, not an unusual occurrence in Hollywood! (And with a title like that, one shouldn’t expect a sober, docudrama approach to the subject!)

Margaux was, in real life, a major league model who had made the cover of Time magazine the year before this film was released, so she seemed a natural choice to play one on film. Her contract with Faberge, to hawk Babe perfume, was the first million-dollar deal ever granted to a fashion model.

The problem was that her voice sounded like Mercedes McCambridge swallowed a dozen ¾” wood screws washed down with Mad Dog 20/20 and followed by a hit of helium. She had a prominent sort of mouth that made her a natural for demonstrating the title product, but there was something unusual about it that a) made it look quite garish at times and b) gave her some type of speech impediment. Thus, a lot of the occasions in the movie in which she is required to talk come out as unintentionally funny. It was, undeniably, a physically demanding part. Though a double was used for some of the really hard knocks, there are plenty of scenes in which she is manhandled and pawed (not to mention licked by Sarandon and made to endure his tongue probing all over her mouth!) And even if it isn’t appealing to listen to, her screams are coming from the heart. It’s not like she wasn’t giving her all in the movie. She just didn’t wind up a very compelling or charismatic actress.
She was roasted by the majority of reviewers and the fact that Mariel landed most of the accolades drove something of a wedge between the siblings. Mariel went on to do several significant movies (not the least of which was Woody Allen’s Manhattan, which gleaned her an Oscar nomination!) while Margaux’s second film was three years later, a tacky Italian production about piranhas called Killer Fish. (This opus somehow managed to bring together a cast that included: Lee Majors, Karen Black, Marisa Berenson, James Franciscus and former NFL quarterback Dan Pastorini! Thus, it is on my must-see list.)

In just those few years, Margaux’s looks were already showing the result of strenuous partying at Studio 54, alcohol and drug use and a couple of eating disorders. The wheels were starting to come off and her own story could be the basis of a movie (albeit, perhaps, a Lifetime movie.) A couple of failed marriages, bouts with clinical depression, a skiing accident and resultant weight gain followed by a comeback in Playboy magazine were topped off with allegations of childhood sexual molestation by her godfather! All this precipitated her death at forty-two, which was ruled a suicide. (Her grandfather, Ernest, was also a suicide, as were three others in the family over the course of four generations.) This sad ending makes Lipstick seem even more exploitive in retrospect. (Incidentally, she was born Margot, but changed the spelling when she found out that she was named for a wine by that name that her parents had been drinking on the night of her conception.)

Mariel, of course, continued her career with varying degrees of success, as did third-billed Perry King (who is profiled elsewhere on this site.) Bancroft was already an Oscar winner by this time for her title role in The Miracle Worker (1962) and was given prestige billing. She adds a certain amount of dramatic weight to the project that is clearly beneath her. Hilariously, while viewing this film recently, my good friend Joe finally announced, “What? Was she preparing for her role in The Rita Moreno Story?” due to her similarly styled frizzy hair and dark looks. You be the judge…

Bancroft enjoyed a fifty-year career in films before succumbing to uterine cancer in 2005 at age seventy-three. The year after Lipstick, she would land a role in The Turning Point with Shirley MacLaine and score another Oscar nomination. This led to some other meaty projects for her such as Agnes of God, which got her one more nod from the Academy.

Sarandon (in a role initially slated for Jeff Bridges!) was still married to his actress wife Susan at this time, though they would be divorced by 1979. After much stage work and a stint on The Guiding Light, his auspicious film debut came with Dog Day Afternoon, in which he was the distraught lover of Al Pacino, who is staging a bank robbery in order to pay for Sarandon’s sex change operation! He was nominated for an Oscar in his debut. Lipstick was, thus, quite a comedown, though his performance is varied and considerable. He is appropriately warped and threatening (and is obviously trying to add levels to a sorely underwritten role.) Had the scriptwriter bothered to give the character some sort of background or motivation, his performance might have been even more successful.

He followed this up with The Sentinel, another unintentionally hooty thriller with an all-star cast. Though he continued working (and does to this day), the momentum he appeared to have begun with Dog Day Afternoon stalled. He did figure prominently, though, in two mid ‘80s films with enduring cult followings. One was The Princess Bride, as Prince Humperdinck, and the other was Fright Night, in which he played a charismatic vampire.

Famed fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo appears as himself in a couple of scenes (Scavullo was notable for having done the infamous Burt Reynolds seminude Cosmopolitan shoot and for taking pics of a young Brooke Shields that were considered heavily sexual for her age. He also helped launch and sustain the career of Gia and took the iconic shot of Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand for A Star is Born.)

Perry, whose role is so extraneous and undeveloped, had been a model himself, notably portraying a sailor in a series of Old Spice advertisements. He continues to act in many TV and film projects, but his son went on to even greater fame. Matthew Perry was, of course, one of the chief actors on the wildly popular sitcom Friends.

Lipstick proved to be popular enough in India for TWO remakes to come about within two years of one another, one in 1980 and one in 1982! In the U.S., references to the film are more likely to be found in “Bad Movies We Love” sort of lists and compendiums. It tries to be good, but isn't good enough and it winds up bad, but not quite bad enough. Fans of Sarandon, Bancroft or either of the Hemingways ought to enjoy watching it one way or the other, though.

Grilling The Hindenburg

Did you honestly think I was out of 1970s disaster movies?? I’m getting dangerously close to the end of them. I guess I’ll eventually have to go back over each one and ruminate some more until I’ve discussed every background extra and every piece of Styrofoam rubble! For today, though, I give you one of the most unique (and, to be truthful, pretty dull) entries in the genre, The Hindenburg. Released in 1975, it failed to ignite the public's fascination to an extent that would help justify its $12 million budget.

In what was one of the mid-20th century's most startling (and baffling) events, the massive German dirigible The Hindenburg was landing in the U.S. after crossing the Atlantic and suddenly burst into flames, killing roughly a third of the people on board and one ground crewman. No one has ever definitively proven what went wrong that day and this film presents a case for sabotage. Based on a detailed book by Michael Mooney, it fabricates a fair amount of storyline, but does boast some very authentic casting and some really impressive attention to detail in the art direction.

In 1937, a time of much espionage, George C. Scott plays a German colonel sent along on the airship to investigate any potential misdeeds among the passengers and crew. Roy Thinnes is a Gestapo agent, also on board, whose methods of investigation differ greatly from Scott's. The men clash at times and Scott even grabs Thinnes by the throat at one point.

A large spectrum of passengers includes: Anne Bancroft as a despondent, pot-smoking countess en route to join her deaf daughter in America, Gig Young as a nervous (and visibly drunk) advertising executive, Robert Clary as an excruciating Jewish entertainer, Rene Auberjonois and Burgess Meredith as untrustworthy gamblers, Peter Donat and Joanna Moore as a decadent Broadway writing couple and Alan Oppenheimer and Katherine Helmond who, with their three children, are returning to America after a visit to Germany.
Among the crew, William Atherton plays a shifty-acting rigger, Richard Dysart is the designer of the ship and Charles Durning is the captain. Scott entertains a sort of German Hercule Poirot stance, sizing up the people on board as the floating vessel billows its way towards its destination until, finally, he discovers the dastardly plans to blow the whole thing to smithereens. At one point Scott grabs Atherton around the neck as well! (Had the Countess been played by Ava Gardner, he no doubt would have half-strangled her, too, as he tended to do during their stormy romance during the filming of The Bible: In the Beginning…!!)

That the ship eventually explodes should come as no surprise to anyone unless he was born under a rock. We really will probably never know for certain what caused the baffling event. People have been debating it for more than seventy years.

Wise, a fine editor (of no less than Citizen Kane!) prior to becoming a highly accomplished director, was in a stage here of filming everything with a numb-inducing solemnity (see also the dire Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which began and probably would have ended the franchise were it not for the more energetic and colorful sequel a few years after! This is an ironic prelude to that film, which also employed many slow shots, paired with lush music, of a giant vessel either hanging stationary or careening around.)

The title vehicle is gorgeous to behold and is shown against varying beautiful landscapes, sunsets, clouds, etc... while some lovely, at times, majestic music by David Shire is heard. Virtually no detail went unchecked in recreating its look, inside and out. It is practically the whole show here since the human element gets short shrift. The scale model work and effects photography are exemplary for 1975 and the 25-foot long “miniature” that was used now hangs in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

The over-sized cast, with a couple of exceptions, is barely able to make the slightest impact, if at all, as the story covers not only the airship, but plenty of on the ground activities as well. Note how the poster (in the then-popular box format, featuring all the stars and using the same labeling method as The Towering Inferno – “The Captain,” “The Countess,” etc…) has some complete nobody in one of the squares! “The Smuggler.” WHO??

Scott, (who really needed his shiny, blotchy, bent nose powdered in his restaurant scene!) brings some much-needed weight to the film with his thoughtful, shaded portrayal. Atherton does a decent job until his preposterous final moment involving a dog, something that didn’t occur in real life. He also has a hair-raising repair scene on the exterior of the zeppelin. Thinnes comes up with a nice amount of smarmy menace in his character.
Bancroft demonstrates why she was the Mommie Dearest producers' first choice before dropping out, haughtily mouthing off in her period clothes and camping it up a tad bit much. She wears a huge, thick ponytail at one point that could not possibly be reworked into the scant bun she displays during the rest of the film. She does, at least, manage to hold the viewer's attention, which is more than can be said for some of the less colorful personalities present. Despite some big names, the cast seems to get lost in a pallid sea of banality. I’ve seen this film many times and still am always surprised to see people in it who I had forgotten because they are so vaguely drawn and colorless. Those who only know Helmond from Soap and Who’s the Boss? will be hard-pressed to even recognize her here.
Clary, who in real life was imprisoned by the Nazis, is nevertheless an acquired taste on screen. His brand of mugging and performing is not something that will thrill everyone. His piano-playing cohort Donat is another actor whose appeal has always escaped me. While he isn’t terrible in the film, someone with a bit more charisma and flair might have been able to put across his scenes a little better.

Moore is stuck with an unduly thick and fake looking blonde wig. The mother of Tatum O’Neal, she had previously been the wife of Ryan O’Neal and had a tumultuous life. Orphaned when a car crash (in which she was not involved) killed everyone in her family but her (her father dying within a year due to injuries), she later lost three fingers in a car accident of her own. Her marriage to O’Neal only lasted long enough for two children to have been conceived and born. Their bitter divorce helped aggravate a serious drug and alcohol problem and cost her custody of the kids. She died in ’93 from lung cancer.

If you come here regularly, you know that I pay tribute to both 1970s disaster movies and to handsome hunks. However, the two topics scarcely ever converge because for some odd reason, these films rarely have any hunks in them! Meandering through this movie in a subordinate role is the closest thing I could find to a hunk, Colby Chester. Probably best known for playing Jill Abbott’s divorce lawyer on The Young and the Restless back when crazy Brenda Dickson had the role, he is cute even now as a salt ‘n pepper daddy type, but never really got very far in movies. He did land more than a few TV guest roles, however. Love that name, too!

Another familiar face in the cast (who isn’t even listed on imdb.com as being in it!) is that of Susan French. French began as a theatre actress before moving to TV in the mid-60s and then to supporting film roles. She’s probably best known as the old version of Jane Seymour’s character in Somewhere in Time (“Come back to me…”) She has a line of dialogue or two, playing a wealthy, haughty passenger on the Hindenburg and is shown many times. Ironically, she was also a passenger on Karen Black’s damaged 747 in Airport 1975! (And Thinnes was the co-pilot in that one, too.)

Of course, the most infamous person in the cast is Young, who is clearly intoxicated even when he isn’t meant to be. He’d been fired from Blazing Saddles (in the Gene Wilder part!) due to his alcoholism and would soon be replaced by John Forsythe as the voice of Charlie on Charlie’s Angels for the same reason. A handsome young man in the 40s and 50s, career disappointments and personal demons would eventually lead him down a destructive and very sad path. Just three years after this movie, he would marry a German actress forty-four years his junior and in a matter of weeks shoot her, then himself, to death.

For the big finale, the film suddenly turns black and white. This is so that Wise could interpolate actual archival footage of the Hindenburg explosion. On the one hand, it adds to the film because it’s spectacular, if unsettling, to see, and it’s unlikely that any recreation at that time could top it. And the new footage matches reasonably well with the old, though it can certainly be discerned. On the other hand, it feels like a cop out. It’s as if Wise decided not to create his own effects and stage his own stunt sequences and instead just ran the old footage with a few new bits interspersed. The entire finale, while decidedly eye-popping, is very murky and disjointed. It’s hard to see what’s happening and to whom, at times. Our eyes, used to color, have to adjust to the already bland characters in monochrome.

During the course of the movie, the script spends too much time on the ground and with various military and government officials for the passengers to be fully fleshed out and worthy of any concern. Rarely has it mattered so little who gets out all right. In real life, the stories of survival were otherworldly and people suffered tremendously during the event. The stories of burning and broiling among those who died and, in some cases, lived are horrible. Here it’s all so slipshod and slapdash with the possible exception of Dysart’s emergence from the tangled inferno and Donat’s use of his hands. So negligible are the characters’ fates that, instead of being shown what happens to each of them, a narrator blurts out a few, but not all, of their statuses (i.e. - "Survived", "DEAD", "DEAD") after the fire as some grainy pictures pop up on screen.

It's a striking story and the film does succeed in presenting the elegant setting and also in setting up a reasonable amount of suspense. It fails in creating any particularly compelling people or a rewarding resolution for them. Maybe the writers didn’t want to offend any potential survivors or their offspring? It could also be that audiences had little concern for an airship bearing the swastika and containing a hefty amount of Nazis. It also has to be said that while it’s sort of fun to watch people like Stella Stevens, Richard Chamberlain and Michael Caine ward off flames and heights, when it’s a real situation, the guilty pleasure begins to have the accent on the guilt. James Cameron later proved, however, with his massive hit Titanic that audiences would go (and go!) to see a fact-based disaster film while being fully aware of the outcome as long as they cared about the people involved.

Then there’s Roger Ebert who pointed out that most disaster flicks are entertaining because the catastrophe occurs pretty early in the picture and we experience the survival along with the participants while, in this case, the final twenty minutes or so are spectacular, but are swift and scant payoff for having sat through a lot of tedium beforehand. Other (less polite) critics made reference to the massive gasbag, comparing the film as being about the same in long-windedness and pace!

Due to its inherently disastrous circumstances, this is always lumped into the disaster movie genre when, in actuality, it's really more of an all-star whodunit (or is about to do it) style of mystery, but without interesting enough characters (or, in some cases, actors) to pull it off. It's a bit of a hybrid, featuring none of the best attributes of either genre, but floating by on the merits of its attention to detail and its overall craftsmanship. The film was nominated for three Oscars in the categories of Set Decoration, Cinematography and Sound and was granted two special Oscars for achievement in Sound Effects and Visual Effects.

To demonstrate how really careful the casting was, I’m linking to a wonderful page that shows the real life passengers and crew paired with screenshots of the actors who either played them or played people inspired by them. The author, Dan, has done a terrific job with this page. The main concession to 1975 seems to be that most of the men, when it came to their hair, eschewed the 1930s center part for the more up to date side part. Otherwise, many of the actors suggest the people they are portraying rather well, or at least some thought was put into it.

http://www.airships.net/blog/the-hindenburg-1975-movie

Lastly, I came upon this shot of Mae West at one of the premieres with Robert Wise. For some reason it cracks me up that Mae would be present for a photo op at a movie like this. I have no reason to think it’s funny other than the fact that I just do! Maybe some of you will find joy in the moment of the picture as well… Perhaps she could have made a cameo appearance in the movie to liven up the joint. And as a final note on the film, I think it comes off better on a second viewing. I just don’t know how many people are going to want to subject themselves to two go-rounds of it!