Freaks

The Two-headed boy with fish scales and a tail, or some variation on that theme, is a staple at the circus, but less so in the movies, to which we go not in search of freaks but for validation of ourselves. The cinema makes rare, and rarely successful, stabs at showing the weirder sides of life, usually reducing the portrayals to the stuff of cult films — Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show — or to the occult and science fiction genres, stuff like “The Blob That Ate Detroit and Married Frankenstein’s Mother-in-law.” Lately, however, and maybe this reflects our growing acceptance of freak-like creatures gallivanting around the country in hot pursuit of our love and votes, the movies are devoting their attention to somewhat more interesting portrayals of the bizarre. Herewith, something of a shopping list of the latest such ventures.

Best Boy tells, with tremendous compassion and concern, of the life and hard times of a child of 52. Philly Wohl is severely retarded, a sweet-tempered, harmless but nearly helpless fellow, living with his aged parents all his life save for a brief and unsuccessful stay at a state home for people like him. His cousin, Ira Wohl, set out both to record Philly’s daily routine and gently to nudge Philly’s parents to acceptance of the desperate need to prepare their son for the day when he should be without them to care for him. His mother, Pearl, tells us that “if God wants to punish somebody, He should do it with retarded children. Such heartache, you wouldn’t believe. Such heartache.”

But you would, you do, believe Pearl, and Max her 78-year-old husband, Philly’s father, who dies during the period covered by the movie; and you believe Philly, struggling to be useful — he is tops at scrubbing pots and pans — and just as energetically struggling to learn and to coexist with others like him when at last the family lets him leave the nest and attend a day-care vocational center and, later, a summer camp for the retarded. Because the film was made not by a prying stranger, but by one of Philly’s relations, a man who loves his cousin and took great care never to exploit him, Best Boy never sinks (or rises) to the level of detached documentary. It opens us to an intimate portrait of a guileless simple fellow, for only a very few minutes permits us to see him at his worst, and leaves us with a more compelling understanding of the lot of the retarded than any but a handful of film or television studies has ever accomplished.

The movie never permits us either to feel safely superior to this innocent, or to feel immune to the plight of his family. There but for the grace of God, and all that: Best Boy shows us a person who is commonly considered a freak, and its genius is that he becomes for the viewer not a freak but a friend. His is the most stereotypical of New York Jewish families—Philly even talks, unselfconsciously, of the ‘goy’ who helped him learn to cross the street by himself—and much of its humor derives from the same material that such as Woody Allen have learned so brilliantly to satirize. In this movie, however, the satire is in short supply, the straight reportage in abundance. Pearl’s “best boy” becomes irresistibly attractive to us, as his present and future condition becomes crushingly heartbreaking. We laugh with him, we cry for him, we hope for him, we exult with him when, permitted to visit Zero Mostel backstage, the two sing one of Philly’s favorites, “If I Were A Rich Man.” Philly is a rich man, rich in human grace, if cruelly cheated by a capricious Nature of his due share of unimpaired brain.

Simon

Simon Mendelssohn is the first screen character created entirely by Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen’s long-time collaborator. Simon tells of a simple, struggling junior professor whose name pops out of the infallible computer lodged at a think tank run by the five most brilliant and twisted men in America, the fellows who substituted a fake Nixon for the real Nixon in China (how could anybody tell the difference?), who rigged the TV Nielsen ratings, who in their idleness dream up ways to confound the world. Bored and imaginative, the five decide to foist upon the world a creature from outer space, and Simon becomes the creature—after they have tampered with his memory and his bodily fluids. But while Simon becomes the first universally accepted specimen of an alien in our midst, his weirdness reduces only to enormous common sense, to a passionate commitment to rid the world of homely grotesqueries like Muzak and hand drying machines instead of paper towels in public lavatories, whereas our weirdness comes in for near-savage parody. Escaping his makers and tormentors, the twisted five and the Army, Simon takes refuge in an ashram devoted to worship of the sacred box, the television set, a cult whose gospel is TV Guide, and whose worship anthem is the Campbell Soup song. Um mm good—both Simon the movie and the kick to our collective national, perhaps international, groin. As Simon Mendelssohn takes charge of the airwaves by appearing simultaneously each night on each of the networks’ evening news, he manages nearly without effort to insinuate himself into the lives of his countrymen, who cannot exist without their daily dose of Cronkite, or, as happens, of Simon from space. Brickman tosses Simon at us to ensnare and then to rib us mercilessly; he, the freak, is shown to be the only normal man alive, while the brains and the powers are clearly seen as monsters, and we peons are unequivocally depicted as morons. Simon is a disquieting comedy, remarkable enough as a compendium of in-jokes and beautifully realized vignettes, even more remarkable as a slash at what passes for normality.

Serial

Serial asks only that we take Marin County, California, as a synecdoche of American trendiness, as the place whence Psychobabble spreads outward to America, as the egocenter of the personal space. A collection of self-absorbed and discontented young marrieds live by the shrink, pray with the Reverend Spike (Tom Smothers) of the chic environmentalist concerns, and hop from bed to bed in relentless pursuit of the perfect fuck or at least the better lay. Serial plays it as it lays, and in its broad sweep across the nauseating landscape of valuelessness manages to touch, with greater or lesser degrees of perception, on the love-thy-convert cults, on the precocious child as foul-mouthed monster syndrome, on the adoringly accepted adultery that passes for open marriage, on the crazes of a nation more concerned about sperm whales and snail darters than about the minds of the crazies who are its citizens. It even allows us one suicide (Bill Macy) to remind us of the price these ‘swingers’ pay, in return for which we are obliged to squirm to the exploits of the golden ones (Martin Mull, Tuesday Weld, Sally Kellerman, among them), to recoil from the arrogant, super-straight talent hunter who weekends as a homosexual biker (Christopher Lee), and, at its best, to wonder how soon this paradigm of ‘sanctified looniness’ will ooze out of California and drown us all. As we are in Simon so are we in Serial: the meat for steak tartare.

Nijinsky

Loathsome is the only word for the lizards populating Nijinsky, a soap opera purporting to document the tale of a great dancer, his lover-mentor, Diaghilev, and his reasons for going bonkers. Even Alan Bates (as Diaghilev), whom few actors of our day can match, much less better, gives the appearance of wishing he could walk straight (no pun) off the screen and into another movie. George de la Peña, who dances nicely enough and looks pretty enough to engage the attentions of Diaghilev, seems to be the nearest thing to a non-freak the movie has to offer, for all that his Nijinsky comes to us at the top and at the bottom of the movie sitting, quite mad, in an insane asylum. Herbert Ross, who provided lovely dance and insufferable posturing in The Turning Point, here inexplicably shortchanges us in dance and bludgeons us with freaks who preen in lieu of acting, who spew forth witticisms that Oscar Wilde would have spurned even if rushed, and who leave the moviegoer with the inescapable impression that homosexuals are incorrigibly bizarre. Oddly enough, gay people who have been frothing about Cruising appear not to have twigged to the fact that Nijinsky is an infinitely more insulting film.

Its utility, however limited, is its brutality—not the brutality of S and M frolic, but the brutality of psychological sadism. These sometimes idle, sometimes oh-so-busy paragons of fashion and decadence are engaged in the relentless quest for a new thrill. The one truly interesting character in the movie is the Baron de Gunzberg, done by Alan Badel as a chap so unpleased by his own reflection in the mirror that messing up the lives of others, consumes his every waking moment. In and out of the movie the baron floats, dropping money as he drops epithets, wishing somebody might love him for him, knowing that nobody ever will. While the dancer and the impresario fume and fuss and throw tantrums, the baron merely despises himself. Badel’s performance is priceless. He is the exact opposite, as far as advantages go, of Philly Wohl, and certainly nobody’s best boy, or best queen, or best anything; but he is Philly Wohl’s mirror image as a freak of Nature.

Caligula

In between the nearly non-stop orgiastic writhings that comprise the most memorable feature of Caligula, we are tempted by an occasional scene showing what Gore Vidal, who worked on the original screenplay and then ran horrified from the final product and removed his name from the abortion, had in mind: a gargantuan film attempting a serious portrait of one of the several vicious freaks who came to power in strutting Rome. Roddy McDowell has made a career out of such loathsome fellows and surely belongs in (though he doesn’t appear in) the film: instead his namesake (and non-relation) Malcolm McDowell does. McDowell’s cuckoobird emperor races back and forth between ludicrous fits of hyena laughter and quick bits of poignant, sometimes powerful introspection. I suppose Caligula, at $17 million, will bring Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione a handsome return on his investment—be prepared to shell out $7.50 for a ticket in New York—and will gratify those looking for a thousand pubic areas, two hundred penises, a couple dozen fellatios, now and again a castration, here and there a disembowelment, a few decapitations, and all the writhing that money can buy.

But at most the movie, to whatever extent it makes itself felt in the general population, will merely confirm the suspicion (and politically useful lie of the ultra-right-wingers) that Rome fell because Romans screwed every which way including up. I saw Serial, with its guilt-ridden orgy scene, just a few days before Caligula, with its approximately one and a half hours (of two and a half hours of film) of energetic orgiastic overkill, and the thought pressed itself rather firmly on my by then exhausted brain, that I and most of the people I know are obviously hopelessly out of shape, and, moreover, that there really isn’t much new under the sun. These are hardly thoughts pregnant with possibility, but they are at least sensations contain-

Jesus

Speaking of the glory and cruelty that was Rome, Jesus, which comes to us as an “inspirational film presentation of a Genesis Project production,” whatever that means, remains true to its promise, to present the story without embellishment or falsification—which means that we receive a hefty chunk of Luke, nothing from Jesus’s mouth that doesn’t appear in that gospel, and a perfectly hideous crucifixion. As a bemused observer of a religion not my own I have ever wondered what possesses hundreds of millions of people to put such holy stress on the most brutal slaughter of a man imaginable (or if not the most brutal, surely one of the most). Brian Deacon, poster perfect as Christ, perfectly, Britishly, enunciating each word, makes of his role, and consequently of the film, a satisfactory cinema depiction of a story that has usually been mauled insensibly on screen. But he comes alive, so to speak, only when he dies. Is it more freakish to snuff out lives as the Romans did, or so adoringly to focus on that execution when constructing the central elements of a great world religion?

The Wicker Man

The same question is asked between the lines in The Wicker Man, an unintentionally comic film about the clash between Christianity and paganism. The setting is a proprietary island off the coast of Scotland, benignly presided over by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee)— an island long since returned to “the old faith” and no longer interested in the faith of the gospels. The crop having failed the year before, this island’s people set a- bout to propitiate the old gods by offering a juicy human sacrifice. The lamb is a devout Christian police sergeant (Edward Woodward), who is lured to the island and toyed with until at length he is locked into a huge wicker idol and set terminally afire. As the is-landers sing their merry little ditty to the sun god and the goddess of fertility, the victim sings a thunderous Christian anthem and sizzles.

Along the way the conflict between two True Faiths is run in and around prettily photographed scenery and luscious depictions of carnal festivity. While the sergeant splutters in rage, the island’s children gambol at the May pole and correctly explain its meaning—it is, after all, a phallic symbol, whatever the Puritans wished to make of it—and the island’s older children copulate with their elders’ blessing. The Wicker Man triumphs even over the sight of Christopher Lee in a fright wig, plausibly demonstrating the preferability of honest heathenism to guilt-ridden Judeo-Christian (as we timidly and mock-ecu-menically are instructed to call it) “morality.” Any theo-logically pretentious movie that allows us several minutes of Britt Ekland, naked, bumping and grinding to en-tice the stuffed-shirt Christian, has at least certain visual appeal. That The Wicker Man makes little of its supposed theme, the preservation even in modern times of pagan observance, is a pity, since even the triumph of “primitivism” over Episcopalianism, devoutly to be desired at least once in a movie, doesn’t rescue the bulk of the film from ludicrousness. Who’s the freak in this? The Lord Summerisle or Sergeant Howie? More like birds of a feather.

The Changeling

The Changeling is haunted house standard, but it is wonderfully imagined nonetheless. A grieving composer/professor (George C. Scott), just recovering from the death of his wife and daughter, moves to Seattle, rents a big house, and soon is made unmistakably aware of the presence of something beside himself therein. The something turns out to be the restless soul of a slaughtered child. We get the picture at a splendidly scary seance and (in the modern vein) on the prof’s tape recording of that table thumping night. As the story unfolds, we realize along with the protagonist that the wealthy Senator Carmichael (Melvyn Douglas) is a changeling, his father a killer decades ago, and the victim a relentlessly vindictive little fellow indeed.

The problem with this sort of horror movie, of course, is its double task: it has at once to be frightening enough to give us thrills, and plausible enough so that we won’t want to spend the night at home alone. In that, The Changeling comes up against a mighty obstacle. We are, after all, sophisticated... and so we don’t believe in this nonsense, not really. And we wonder why the ghost has waited from 1906, when he was untimely ripped from life, until the 1970s before manifesting himself (or itself) to one of a succession of occupants of the house. That’s always the case, figuring out why the nastiness breaks out just then, just when the movie takes place. Forget it; The Changeling is the sleekest and most satisfying movie of its type in the last couple of years, and it fits nicely here in this shopping list not only because its supernatural ingredients are freakish but also because its bad guy is so deliciously unappetizing. The senator, as Douglas does him, probably doesn’t even know that he’s the beneficiary of a 70-year-old murder, but he is sufficiently venal in any case. We don’t know if he votes the wrong way, but lordy he comes equipped with his entourage of proto-Hamilton Jordans, and the trappings of power falling on his frail shoulders ought to be frightening e- nough to Americans finally beginning to get the point about our national horror. Our national horror is our willing acceptance of a concentration of power in the hands not just of the wrong people but of any people. Compared to that, an avenging spirit haunting a spooky house is a mere trifle.

LR’s film critic reviews films weekly for The Boston Herald American, twice weekly for WHDH Radio, and daily for WNAC-TV (CBS), all in Boston. He is the host of talk programs on both stations, writes a thrice-weekly newspaper column, and reviews books for a number of journals. He is also Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex County (Massachusetts).

© Copyright David Brudnoy, 1980