Conference bookie::movies

338.0. "Tuesday Weld" by ESGWST::RDAVIS (Live monkey brain) Mon Sep 27 1993 14:24

    She is a wolf disguised as a sheep lurking to prey upon the weaker
    wolf. Her simultaneously sheepish and volpine smile blatantly admits as
    much; those attracted are quick to claim deceit when they were merely
    outsmarted.  

    That smile, that smile... a George Herriman moon under two sadly
    impossible stars.  Her small gappily placed teeth are a physical --
    thus cinematic -- emblem of the eternally enticing but unbridgeable
    distance between the predator and the lover, the distance between dream
    and reality. They represent the generative nature of all gaps,
    teasingly opposed by her "family" name while her "given" name hints at
    the very god of conflict.

    As Thalia Menninger, the tragic eternal return among Dobie Gillis's
    many loves, she capped America's harsh social pyramid. Like other marks
    of capitalist aristocracy, Thalia was achingly apparently available to
    any male who could construct the known magic signs of "maleness" with a
    simulacrum of ease. And yet she always retreated out of reach, a
    materialist will-of-the-wisp. Appropriately, the character suggests
    both muse and disease; class mobility is our land's true belle dame
    sans merci.

    In 1956's "Rock, Rock, Rock!", Weld established the place of Alan
    Freed, Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers (cf. the Rock Hall of Fame, itself
    named after her film), and Chuck Berry in the American consiousness
    while again symbolizing (if any presence as thoroughgoingly _physical_
    as Weld's can be called symbolic -- but she embodies the ethereal,
    and, by her contrast, fades the real to misty backdrop) the painful yet
    erotic, uneven and widely-spaced bitemark which protein-hungry
    economics leaves on the apparently yielding flesh of love.

    Career tragedy struck in 1960's beautifully titled and timed but
    imperfectly executed "Sex Kittens Go To College", in which Mamie Van
    Doren usurped Weld's natural role of misinterpreted genius. Weld
    retired, reflected, and finally returned, cardiac tissue still more
    scar-toughened, determined to build a meaningful life and career from
    such demeaning roles.

    1966's "Lord Love a Duck" was the first of what may be termed the
    Dobie-deconstructions, and began a 6 year period of expansion in Weld's
    screen time. Here Roddy McDowell plays the young upstart whose
    intellect (signalled by his mid-Atlantic accent) is purportedly only
    surpassed by the passion inspired by Weld. The latter easily reduces
    the owlish McDowell to hawk-like screaming while he mows down
    suburbanites, presenting ironic parallels both to the bloody
    technocrats conducting the Vietnam War and to the impending
    "revolutionary" fervor which would reap Richard Nixon as its reward.

    Anthony Perkins was teamed with Weld for the first time in 1968's
    "Pretty Poison", which begins as a comedy of eco-terrorism and ends in
    nuclear family disaster. His charmingly awkward psychotic makes a
    particularly fetching Dobie to her jeune fille fatale; one can only
    wish that the ensuing jaundiced stereoscopic vision had been trained on
    a series of such counterculture absurdities.

    This happiest stage of her career peaked in 1972's "Play It As It
    Lays", the film which should have established Weld and Perkins as the
    Garbo and Gilbert of our time. Here for once we are allowed to turn our
    gaze from the splashy but tedious male tragedies littering the wings of
    Weld's performance and to focus on her own eventual tragedy, the
    Kafkaesque tragedy of a wolf become convinced she is a maladjusted
    sheep.

    Alas, then as now, nothing frightened Hollywood more than a great
    actress in full possession of her powers, and thereafter she was forced
    to split her talent between large parts in the insultingly timid world
    of television movies and insultingly small parts in the edgy material
    she loves best.

    "Mother and Daughter: The Loving War" is well worth a look, but 1974's
    "Reflections of Murder" may be the best of Weld's TV work.  This morbid
    tale of wavering female solidarity, with its gloomy damp mood, is
    perfectly set in a New England college.  Sam Waterson, resplendant in
    elbow patches, plays Prof. Cha. Pigg, an irritating womanizer familiar
    to any liberal arts grad; Weld and Joan Hackett-and-hackett-and-hackett
    play the mistress and the little woman.  It's  a sharp and tidy tale;
    easy to see why Nazi-collaborator Henri-Georges "Inspector" Clouzot
    also tried to film it, although with a far inferior cast and setting.

    "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" and "Once Upon a Time in America" can stand
    for any number of films setting Weld in beautifully played but utterly
    thankless roles, each as thinly conceived as an imbecile scrawl on a
    toilet stall, each cliche transmuted by Weld into glimpses of gold
    behind the tedious foreground rubble of inferior stars-du-jour. She
    surmounts the sexist rock-and-hard-place of Lovable Whore and Frigid
    Bitch by merging the roles into mythically feral intelligence and
    satisfaction in an emotional job drafted into but well done.  And such
    small portions!

    Whither Weld?  Perhaps her divine gifts will finally gain wide-spread
    recognition in the wake of Les Blank's documentary, "Gap-Toothed
    Women", and Matthew Sweet's album, "Girlfriend".  Perhaps she will
    direct, produce, write, and star in several high-budget masterpieces
    based on the works of 19th century female novelists.  Perhaps she'll
    meet and marry an unusually sensitive software engineer in the prime of
    his life.  But no matter what happens, we -- every one of us -- must
    forever treasure the wavering pure flame which she has left like some
    thoughtless camper in our hearts, or forever regret the overzealous
    bear who put it out.
    
    Ray

	.0

	Did you write that or type it in from something?  It sounds
	like an obituary, did she die recently?

    re .0, is Ms. Weld aware of your feelings, Ray?  :-)
    
    
    (That's okay.  I understand.  I'm in love with Neil Young myself.)
     We all need our heroes.)   :-)
    
    
    Lorna
    

    re .1, an obituary????!!!!  I thought it sounded like a declaration of
    love!!
    
    
    Lorna  (always, well *sometimes* the romantic)  :-)
    

    Lorna, I still hope to discuss my feelings with Ms. Weld over several
    dozen espressi doppoli someday. 
    
    Jeff, I wrote it AND typed it in.  Call me Mr. Versitality. 
    
    Ray

    
    Raimondo redux! What a paean to a mod maenad! My high-school beaux
    and platonic friends adored her - one called her Mlle Mardi and
    babbled incoherently the day after "Dobie" aired.
    
    I'm sure that, like a fine Sauternes, she has been well-served by the
    passage of time, unlike Dobie's competition Mr. Beatty.
    
    Benvenuto
    
    Gloria

    That's "Versatility".  I don't know whether to blame the writer or the
    typist for this, but heads will roll!
    
    Ray

While her role in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" may have been thankless, it
*did* get her an Academy Award nomination...

And how could you overlook her deconstruction of her sex-kitten role as
Mrs. Prendergast in "Falling Down"?

Was she also in Heartbreak Hotel? Nice movie; maybe not great, but a lot
better than I expected...

alan