D. Bertrand Shore
Colour
The most decorative part of ‘Mad Men’ these days is Jessica Paré. I mean that both in the sense that she's lovely to look at, but also she’s the lady the programme clearly has the most lascivious interest in. Yes there’s Christina Hendricks and her bosom, and there's the trim figure of January Jones - but Jessica Paré is the actress most likely to strip down to her underwear, or a bikini, and have the camera linger licking its lens-like lips over her shapely form. Obviously the thing with having a young trophy wife is that she should be attractive and willing to show herself off, but it's not only Don who enjoys her, it's the show itself. In fact we’re all guilty, as she's put there on camera for the audience to ogle and – yes – we duly ogle. And as much as I love ‘Mad Men’, I can't help thinking that her character suffers a little through her being so decorative, as sometimes she's not there to add weight to a scene, she’s just there to appear in her bra and knickers.
I guess though the actress is used to it as earlier in her career she appeared in this strange portmanteau spin on the mythic legend of Pygmalion. In a role which must have sounded distinctly weird when her agent described it to her, she plays an ancient Greek statue in a fusty old museum, which actually comes to life when someone sees her and most desires and needs it. So older divorced businessman Elliot Gould gets to take her – her wearing only a slip of a dress – to an event in an art gallery, where he gets to show her (and her lovely, slim legs) off to his workmates who think he's more ancient than a dinosaur fart. Gould to be fair though doesn't require any more than a quick smack on the lips from his Greek goddess. Heather Graham though is a nervous bi-curious girl who has had her heart broken by too many men and needs some company. A girly afternoon of course becomes something hotter and heavier (Heather Graham is another highly objectified actress, with filmmakers seeming to adore pressing her against other girls); while finally Joseph Fiennes overacts horrendously as a mad theatre director who needs a night of sheer naked passion to unleash his genius.
This ridiculously over-qualified cast elevates it above what it really should be, which is of course porn. Indeed the audience most likely to gravitate towards this might be a tad disappointed, as when things do get steamy it’s all decidedly soft-core. Without a doubt though it’s a highly sexist film, and at the centre of this sexism is Jessica Paré – who is simply there to be ogled and lusted over through every frame. She’s literally a doll that comes to life, a perfectly carved pieced of marble which springs into existence when somebody is sad and needy enough to desire her soft and feminine touch. Once alive she can be dressed however the beholder wants, and then undressed on demand. In no way is she a real character, certainly not a real woman and, really, the whole thing is a tad depressing.
Of course it's seedy, of course it's objectifying – but is it really so massively different to Mad Men's approach to the actress?
Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Sunday, 15 June 2014
The Female Boss (1964)
D. Valentine Woolf
B&W
Here's a moody black & white melodrama that was no doubt on Matthew Weiner's radar when he created ‘Mad Men’ (although since he oddly claims that he hadn't read Richard Yates's superb ‘Revolutionary Road’ – which looks, feels and smells like a full drawn out blueprint [bathrooms, windows and all fixtures included] for ‘Mad Men’ – then perhaps it actually, and slightly incredibly, wasn't). It’s set in New York in the early 1960s, centring on a high-flying business executive in a power suit, played with charismatic authority by a born star performer. This is a character who drinks and smokes far too much across the course of the day, there’s office intrigue and drama, and even the possibility of romance with a younger member of staff. Except, the twist here is that this executive is played by the divine Ms Joan Crawford.
Clearly latching on to Ms Crawford’s role at Pepsi Cola (she had married an executive and did a hell of a lot of work for the second of America’s fizzy drinks companies, and at his death wound up on the board); we have on the back of her marketability in ‘Whatever happened to Baby Jane’, Ms Crawford in corporate America. There she is in a dark tailored suit staring down subordinates (and particularly insubordinates) when she finds herself Acting President, steering the company through a crisis after the beloved old President dies. The industry she works in is left deliberately vague, but even if it’s not advertising she does get to stride around like a proto feminist Don Draper exuding ruthless arrogance or delicate feminine charm, depending on the encounter. As Don is far luckier than her, because she also has to face blatant sexism in the workplace: snide voices plot against her, believing her to be just as a token women who has risen too far, or refer to her as “the secretary”, or say that her power has come through some undescribed (but no doubt salacious) incident.
Unfortunately beyond 'a woman in the boardroom, that’s a crazy, new idea!' the film doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. She’s Acting President for most of the film, but the main thrust of the story is her trying to find the right candidate to be full time President and at the end she does and it’s a man (albeit a very liberal, modern sort of man). So the film isn’t ready yet to accept a woman as full-time head of the boardroom. But more than that it strives to show how hard this corporate life is, but it also strives to show that it's especially hard on a woman, which kind of undermines its supposed ‘sexes are equal’ ethos. Still the pressure of proving herself means we get lots of great scenes of Joan in angry meetings, steely-eyed confrontations, and then – afterwards – her jaw wobbling when she's back in her own office supping a much needed tumbler of whisky. Jon Hamm’s Don Draper may be many things, but he rarely lets his jaw wobble – and certainly not as divinely as Joan’s does here.
With an aesthetic borrowed straight from ‘The Apartment’ (so much so you expect a cameo from Jack Lemmon, talking to his wife on the phone and still calling her “Miss Kubelik”) this is without a doubt a well-intentioned film, but one which hasn't really thought through its convictions enough to have courage in them.
B&W
Here's a moody black & white melodrama that was no doubt on Matthew Weiner's radar when he created ‘Mad Men’ (although since he oddly claims that he hadn't read Richard Yates's superb ‘Revolutionary Road’ – which looks, feels and smells like a full drawn out blueprint [bathrooms, windows and all fixtures included] for ‘Mad Men’ – then perhaps it actually, and slightly incredibly, wasn't). It’s set in New York in the early 1960s, centring on a high-flying business executive in a power suit, played with charismatic authority by a born star performer. This is a character who drinks and smokes far too much across the course of the day, there’s office intrigue and drama, and even the possibility of romance with a younger member of staff. Except, the twist here is that this executive is played by the divine Ms Joan Crawford.
Clearly latching on to Ms Crawford’s role at Pepsi Cola (she had married an executive and did a hell of a lot of work for the second of America’s fizzy drinks companies, and at his death wound up on the board); we have on the back of her marketability in ‘Whatever happened to Baby Jane’, Ms Crawford in corporate America. There she is in a dark tailored suit staring down subordinates (and particularly insubordinates) when she finds herself Acting President, steering the company through a crisis after the beloved old President dies. The industry she works in is left deliberately vague, but even if it’s not advertising she does get to stride around like a proto feminist Don Draper exuding ruthless arrogance or delicate feminine charm, depending on the encounter. As Don is far luckier than her, because she also has to face blatant sexism in the workplace: snide voices plot against her, believing her to be just as a token women who has risen too far, or refer to her as “the secretary”, or say that her power has come through some undescribed (but no doubt salacious) incident.
Unfortunately beyond 'a woman in the boardroom, that’s a crazy, new idea!' the film doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. She’s Acting President for most of the film, but the main thrust of the story is her trying to find the right candidate to be full time President and at the end she does and it’s a man (albeit a very liberal, modern sort of man). So the film isn’t ready yet to accept a woman as full-time head of the boardroom. But more than that it strives to show how hard this corporate life is, but it also strives to show that it's especially hard on a woman, which kind of undermines its supposed ‘sexes are equal’ ethos. Still the pressure of proving herself means we get lots of great scenes of Joan in angry meetings, steely-eyed confrontations, and then – afterwards – her jaw wobbling when she's back in her own office supping a much needed tumbler of whisky. Jon Hamm’s Don Draper may be many things, but he rarely lets his jaw wobble – and certainly not as divinely as Joan’s does here.
With an aesthetic borrowed straight from ‘The Apartment’ (so much so you expect a cameo from Jack Lemmon, talking to his wife on the phone and still calling her “Miss Kubelik”) this is without a doubt a well-intentioned film, but one which hasn't really thought through its convictions enough to have courage in them.
Sunday, 12 January 2014
The Ideas Man (1970)
D. Robert Parrish
Colour
So, how will ‘Mad Men’ end? How will Don Draper cope with the final days of the 1960s? Will a swarm of hippies take over Sterling Cooper, lured there by Roger and the promise of LSD? Will Peggy and Joan stage a management buy-out, and guide their new firm in a truly feminist direction with copies of ‘The Female Eunuch’ and ‘Spare Rib’ scattered about the place? Or will the final shot be a close-up of Sally Draper taking a puff of a specially rolled cigarette, the younger generation hailing in the 1970s through a haze of marijuana smoke?
Maybe we can hunt for clues in this neglected 1970 comedy about advertising, one of the many, many, many, many Peter Sellers films which now sit ignored and gathering dust in our collective memory. Much like his friend and sometime co-star, Michael Caine (we’ll cover some of their work together later this week), Sellers seemed to delight in just making total and utter tripe. We all remember ‘The Pink Panther’ films (although we can probably agree there that quality was rarely the watch word), we of course know ‘Doctor Strangelove’ and we have a soft spot for ‘Being There’. But amongst those high points there is masses of crap, a troupe of elephants worth of crap, literally your mind would explode if you tried to visualise just how much crap there is.
What are we waiting for?
Peter Sellers is Simon Harper, a new arrival at a Madison Avenue ad agency. He comes with a big reputation, apparently having done fantastic work in Britain and looking to make it in Manhattan. Unfortunately the ad agency has chosen the wrong Simon Harper, this one has flunked out of every ad agency he ever worked at and is a joke back home. However his guileless self-confidence carries him through and he acts as if he’s earned his position. And of course when he comes up with his simple, childish ideas the yanks love them. They see it as a new wave in advertising, clients are eating out of his hand and before long he’s the wunderkind of New York. (Although ostensibly a satire on advertising, isn’t this scenario really just a swipe at Americans? After all this character was a flop in sophisticated Britain, but in New York his work is apparently infantile enough to be cutting edge). Of course this is the same type of thing Sellers would later do with Chancy Gardner, though probably the reason this film is less well known is that ‘Being There’ doesn’t try to marry it to the occasional Inspector Clouseau pratfall or a disconcertingly rampant libido.
If you’ve seen ‘Mad Men’, then you’ll see all the trappings in their original form. There are the very bright late 60s wall dressings and furniture, there are the girls in miniskirts, there is even a buxom redhead (although nowhere near as swoonsome as Christina Hendricks). And what’s more, once his ‘talent’ starts to show Sellers finds himself fawned over and flirted with by nubile young sweetie after nubile young sweetie. Peter Sellers as Don Draper, before Don Draper even existed. A far-seeing spoof that comments on advertising, work place politics of the time and two nations separated by a common language – whilst also peering forward to one of our finest modern day dramas.
And yet none of it works.
Peter Sellers, the fat boy of 1950s British cinema lost weight and decided he wanted to be a sex symbol. This change from just wanting to make people laugh to wanting to be James Bond had a terrible effect on his career. It’s a basic truism that it’s hard to be funny whilst also portraying yourself as a successful ladies man. The comedy of failure is just too seductive; the comedy of failure in actual seduction doubly so. As a result this film stops being a comedy, and just becomes a fantasy for a randy middle-aged man who wants to cop off with young flesh (while occasionally slipping out of an office swivel chair). There’s actually a pattern of this in Sellers’ career - his randy forty something shagging Goldie Hawn comedy ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ has not aged well, nor his attempts to seduce his own wife in ‘The Bobo’. It must have been nice to get the girls, the kissing scenes no doubt boosted his ego – but, seriously, why is this supposed to be funny? Even in 1970 the hand of our middle aged star creeping up the thigh of his just turned twenty secretary, would surely have counted more as ‘ewwww’ creepy rather than ‘roll around on the floor, clutch our sides, piss ourselves with laughter’ merriment.
At the end a cameoing Roger Moore arrives as the real and unbelievable glamorous Simon Harper, the one who succeeded in London. It involves another comic pratfall from our star, but Moore exposes Sellers as a fraud. But here’s the thing, Sellers work was so good he has won the respect of his colleagues and peers, they decide to stay with the idiot savant manqué anyway. Why not? They’re all making money and living the life, so what’s not to like? And maybe that’s how ‘Mad Men’ should end. It turns out the real Don Draper didn’t die in Korea and instead walks back through the doors of Sterling Cooper to claim his place. But the power of consumerism wins out and our Don gets to keep his name and his life and they all live happily ever after.
And I will love the show more than I already do, if in this big revelation, the returning Don Draper is played by – please, please, please – Sir Roger Moore!
Colour
So, how will ‘Mad Men’ end? How will Don Draper cope with the final days of the 1960s? Will a swarm of hippies take over Sterling Cooper, lured there by Roger and the promise of LSD? Will Peggy and Joan stage a management buy-out, and guide their new firm in a truly feminist direction with copies of ‘The Female Eunuch’ and ‘Spare Rib’ scattered about the place? Or will the final shot be a close-up of Sally Draper taking a puff of a specially rolled cigarette, the younger generation hailing in the 1970s through a haze of marijuana smoke?
Maybe we can hunt for clues in this neglected 1970 comedy about advertising, one of the many, many, many, many Peter Sellers films which now sit ignored and gathering dust in our collective memory. Much like his friend and sometime co-star, Michael Caine (we’ll cover some of their work together later this week), Sellers seemed to delight in just making total and utter tripe. We all remember ‘The Pink Panther’ films (although we can probably agree there that quality was rarely the watch word), we of course know ‘Doctor Strangelove’ and we have a soft spot for ‘Being There’. But amongst those high points there is masses of crap, a troupe of elephants worth of crap, literally your mind would explode if you tried to visualise just how much crap there is.
What are we waiting for?
Peter Sellers is Simon Harper, a new arrival at a Madison Avenue ad agency. He comes with a big reputation, apparently having done fantastic work in Britain and looking to make it in Manhattan. Unfortunately the ad agency has chosen the wrong Simon Harper, this one has flunked out of every ad agency he ever worked at and is a joke back home. However his guileless self-confidence carries him through and he acts as if he’s earned his position. And of course when he comes up with his simple, childish ideas the yanks love them. They see it as a new wave in advertising, clients are eating out of his hand and before long he’s the wunderkind of New York. (Although ostensibly a satire on advertising, isn’t this scenario really just a swipe at Americans? After all this character was a flop in sophisticated Britain, but in New York his work is apparently infantile enough to be cutting edge). Of course this is the same type of thing Sellers would later do with Chancy Gardner, though probably the reason this film is less well known is that ‘Being There’ doesn’t try to marry it to the occasional Inspector Clouseau pratfall or a disconcertingly rampant libido.
If you’ve seen ‘Mad Men’, then you’ll see all the trappings in their original form. There are the very bright late 60s wall dressings and furniture, there are the girls in miniskirts, there is even a buxom redhead (although nowhere near as swoonsome as Christina Hendricks). And what’s more, once his ‘talent’ starts to show Sellers finds himself fawned over and flirted with by nubile young sweetie after nubile young sweetie. Peter Sellers as Don Draper, before Don Draper even existed. A far-seeing spoof that comments on advertising, work place politics of the time and two nations separated by a common language – whilst also peering forward to one of our finest modern day dramas.
And yet none of it works.
Peter Sellers, the fat boy of 1950s British cinema lost weight and decided he wanted to be a sex symbol. This change from just wanting to make people laugh to wanting to be James Bond had a terrible effect on his career. It’s a basic truism that it’s hard to be funny whilst also portraying yourself as a successful ladies man. The comedy of failure is just too seductive; the comedy of failure in actual seduction doubly so. As a result this film stops being a comedy, and just becomes a fantasy for a randy middle-aged man who wants to cop off with young flesh (while occasionally slipping out of an office swivel chair). There’s actually a pattern of this in Sellers’ career - his randy forty something shagging Goldie Hawn comedy ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ has not aged well, nor his attempts to seduce his own wife in ‘The Bobo’. It must have been nice to get the girls, the kissing scenes no doubt boosted his ego – but, seriously, why is this supposed to be funny? Even in 1970 the hand of our middle aged star creeping up the thigh of his just turned twenty secretary, would surely have counted more as ‘ewwww’ creepy rather than ‘roll around on the floor, clutch our sides, piss ourselves with laughter’ merriment.
At the end a cameoing Roger Moore arrives as the real and unbelievable glamorous Simon Harper, the one who succeeded in London. It involves another comic pratfall from our star, but Moore exposes Sellers as a fraud. But here’s the thing, Sellers work was so good he has won the respect of his colleagues and peers, they decide to stay with the idiot savant manqué anyway. Why not? They’re all making money and living the life, so what’s not to like? And maybe that’s how ‘Mad Men’ should end. It turns out the real Don Draper didn’t die in Korea and instead walks back through the doors of Sterling Cooper to claim his place. But the power of consumerism wins out and our Don gets to keep his name and his life and they all live happily ever after.
And I will love the show more than I already do, if in this big revelation, the returning Don Draper is played by – please, please, please – Sir Roger Moore!
Sunday, 17 November 2013
Advertisement (1981)
D.
Malcolm McClaren
Colour and B&W
I suppose it’s easy to see the attraction Orson Welles and Malcolm McClaren must have felt for each other. Have there ever been two more arch pranksters? Have two men ever greeted failure with a more knowing smile and a glint in the eye which suggested it was all actually planned? A collaboration, when you stop to think about it, seems obvious. But if they were to make a film together, who’d have put money on Malcolm McClaren handling the directing?
This is a genuine curio, an oddity even stranger than Welles’ own ‘F for Fake’. Clearly inspired by Welles’ tribulations when hawking frozen peas a few years prior, ‘Advertisement’ finds him pushing a vast array of different products. Here he is stood in a bowling alley, marching up from the pins and extolling Pepsi Cola in that honeyed voice of his; while there he is explaining his lovely waistline with reference to Big Macs, while a mime artist dressed as Ronald McDonald is beaten up behind him.
Yes, these are real products and the idea seems to have been that the film would be part funded by having the companies themselves take their little segments and screen them as part of an advertising campaign.
That, of course, never happened – hence why this film remains so lost and neglected (but this blog exists for neglected films). Surely the two of them could have guessed that a portly washed up Hollywood trouble maker, no matter how fascinating and charismatic he remained, was not the best pitch person for a bunch of random products. Particularly as a great many of these items are provincially British based, thus limiting the market of potential buyers even further. While McClaren’s offbeat visual style, and the need both of them seem to have to subvert these products even whilst selling them, means that it’s unlikely that any gaudy braces sporting Don Draper would have snapped these promos up.
Oddest moment? I think that’s a choice between Welles posing in a giant nappy and waving a rattle, telling us how much he adores Farley’s Rusks; or Welles standing side by side with Sid Vicious – in a segment filmed in 1978 – waxing lyrically about the virtues of Mars bars while young Sid stuffs his sneering face full.
It’s a small monument to how much Welles adored Europe and how that adoration led him down lots of odd little (sometimes completely blind) alleyways. He’s never a boring watch and it’s another example of how his talents are never truly wasted, even when the film around him is clearly and utterly not worthy of him. And it’s once again Orson Welles (and Malcolm McClaren too) going off on a mad adventure of his own and not caring about the consequences.
‘Advertisement’ is definitely not without interest, but a 78 minute string of commercials is tough to watch in one go, no matter who the pitchman is.
Colour and B&W
I suppose it’s easy to see the attraction Orson Welles and Malcolm McClaren must have felt for each other. Have there ever been two more arch pranksters? Have two men ever greeted failure with a more knowing smile and a glint in the eye which suggested it was all actually planned? A collaboration, when you stop to think about it, seems obvious. But if they were to make a film together, who’d have put money on Malcolm McClaren handling the directing?
This is a genuine curio, an oddity even stranger than Welles’ own ‘F for Fake’. Clearly inspired by Welles’ tribulations when hawking frozen peas a few years prior, ‘Advertisement’ finds him pushing a vast array of different products. Here he is stood in a bowling alley, marching up from the pins and extolling Pepsi Cola in that honeyed voice of his; while there he is explaining his lovely waistline with reference to Big Macs, while a mime artist dressed as Ronald McDonald is beaten up behind him.
Yes, these are real products and the idea seems to have been that the film would be part funded by having the companies themselves take their little segments and screen them as part of an advertising campaign.
That, of course, never happened – hence why this film remains so lost and neglected (but this blog exists for neglected films). Surely the two of them could have guessed that a portly washed up Hollywood trouble maker, no matter how fascinating and charismatic he remained, was not the best pitch person for a bunch of random products. Particularly as a great many of these items are provincially British based, thus limiting the market of potential buyers even further. While McClaren’s offbeat visual style, and the need both of them seem to have to subvert these products even whilst selling them, means that it’s unlikely that any gaudy braces sporting Don Draper would have snapped these promos up.
Oddest moment? I think that’s a choice between Welles posing in a giant nappy and waving a rattle, telling us how much he adores Farley’s Rusks; or Welles standing side by side with Sid Vicious – in a segment filmed in 1978 – waxing lyrically about the virtues of Mars bars while young Sid stuffs his sneering face full.
It’s a small monument to how much Welles adored Europe and how that adoration led him down lots of odd little (sometimes completely blind) alleyways. He’s never a boring watch and it’s another example of how his talents are never truly wasted, even when the film around him is clearly and utterly not worthy of him. And it’s once again Orson Welles (and Malcolm McClaren too) going off on a mad adventure of his own and not caring about the consequences.
‘Advertisement’ is definitely not without interest, but a 78 minute string of commercials is tough to watch in one go, no matter who the pitchman is.
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