Breezy (1973) and Ginger in the Morning (1974)
Both Breezy (1973) and Ginger in the Morning (1974) offer a fantasy, not only of a pert female hitchhiker offering herself to an older, divorced man, but also symbolically: an American cultural fantasy in which the wounds of the 60s revolution are healed in the happy union between the girl’s youthful idealism and the man’s paternal stability.
In Breezy, director Clint Eastwood pairs the 54 year old William Holden with the 19 year old Kay Lenz. Holden believes that life has passed him by, while Lenz’s character, named Edith Alice Breezerman or “Breezy,” is a southern California hippie chick who thinks life is beautiful and Holden is too.
Lenz has a terrifically nubile figure, shown with blunt gratuitousness in several scenes, but no acting ability. Her character comes across as less free-spirited than mentally challenged. Holden is wearily resigned, as if expecting Lenz to spill something on his carpet and leave him with the cleaning bill. There is no chemistry between them, which makes the age difference embarrassing rather than romantic.
There is a hint of a better movie when Eastwood briefly lets us see the dark reality of Laurel Canyon at the time in Lenz’s friend Marcy (Jamie Smith-Jackson), strung out on drugs and evidently pimped out by an abusive boyfriend. But this is left aside.
Compared with the 35 year age difference in Breezy, the 14 years between Sissy Spacek and Monte Markham in Ginger in the Morning barely registers, but the same device of the square divorced man picking up a love-smitten young hitchhiker obtains: America symbolically re-stitched across the generation gap. Sissy Spacek, who can of course act, is given dumb lines that signal the safe and fuzzy version of the revolution she represents: “If I’m gonna throw a bomb, it’s gonna be a love bomb. And if I’m gonna trip out, it’s gonna be a love trip. Know what I mean?”
Eastwood’s movie is a more polished production, while Ginger in the Morning is an amateurish three-act play that looks as if it were made for 1970s television. On the other hand, Ginger in the Morning may have something closer to an idea rattling around in its head, at least when it references It Happened One Night, which makes you recall the sublime Gable-Colbert hitchhiking scene and mourn that so little of its flame survives in the dingy 1970s.
Blume in Love (1973) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973)
The great American filmmaker of marriage and the counterculture was Paul Mazursky, who burst into cinematic history in 1969 with his brilliant Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, stripping away the pretensions of the sexual revolution to reveal confused and fragile people who want to love and be loved. Married for six decades to his wife Betsy, Mazursky was young enough to experience the temptations of the counterculture and Jewish enough to stand a step back from it all and observe, sympathetically but with penetrating questioning, its costs, motives, and deformations.
The devastatingly fine Bob &, etc. would become the landmark of this cinematic exploration, rivaled only by Richard Lester’s Petulia. However, Mazursky pushed this investigation further in his 1973 Blume in Love. George Segal’s Blume gets caught cheating on his wife Nina, who promptly divorces him and takes up with a country-bred troubadour named Elmo. But this is a divorce movie that is really a marriage movie, part of a long film tradition going back to the silent era, in which a marriage, to be truly understood, must be experienced in its dissolution.
Blume’s love for his wife (a great performance by Susan Anspach) extends into their divorce and beyond, even including his affection for her new lover Elmo (a beatific Kris Kristofferson, the Gentile counterbalance to the Jewish Segal). Plumbing every depth of this marriage, past the normative limits of matrimony, even includes a scene of (post-)marital rape that renders the movie too radioactive for it to have the purchase it deserves today. Yet, like most everything Mazursky does, this is a humane movie that takes love and loyalty seriously, even more seriously than the revolutionaries’ demands that we redefine or deny such things.
Blume in Love begs comparison with another movie of the same year that explores a marriage after divorce, and even after physical assault. Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) can be seen as the Swedish version of Mazursky’s Jewish-American meditation. The latter is more sympathetic, Segal being vastly more likeable than Erland Josephson’s insufferable character. Mazursky’s Bloom goes through a process of profound emptying and expansion of the self that is the opposite of the stony characters in Bergman’s study.
But both movies try to locate the essence and meaning of a marriage in something that transcends its legal and social definitions. Bergman’s movie ends with the couple, divorced and married to other people, having an affair with each other. Again, the proposition that a marriage is not fully appreciated until its violation goes back to the classic movie remarriage plot, though neither Bergman’s nor Mazursky’s couples remarry each other at the end. The real difference in the 1970s is the sense that there is no longer any stable institution to return to, no marital home that can be reconstituted. This is not experiment, but exile.
Mazursky followed up with Harry and Tonto. It is not his best work—the familial conflicts that are presented as motivating the story are never felt in a movie in which everyone seems immediately to like each other—though it has some pleasures along the way. Divorce does not figure at all in this movie, and I only mention it because one of those pleasures is another hitchhiker named Ginger, in this case played by the young Melanie Mayron, who has the most heart-meltingly Yiddishe punim (Jewish face) in all of moviedom.
A Touch of Class (1973)
George Segal was the most understated and sympathetic of the Nice Jewish Bad Boys of the 1970s. He wasn’t off-putting like Richard Benjamin and Elliot Gould could sometimes be. (Gould and Segal are both riveting when paired in Robert Altman’s 1974 movie of gambling addiction, California Split, their different registers brought out beautifully when juxtaposed.) Segal doesn’t have the occasional mama’s boy element of the other two either, even when he is asked to play a weak or neurotic character. He had more range and subtlety, straight man to a particularly delicious Barbra Streisand in the romantic comedy The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), a heroin addict who can’t be reformed by Karen Black in Born to Win (1971).
Asked to play a whiny American in England, he pales next to Glenda Jackson and her formidable bangs in A Touch of Class (1973). Jackson is a single mother, six months divorced, while Segal regularly cheats on his wife while on overseas business trips. Both are busy professionals looking for enjoyable sex with no long-term commitment.
Of course, the movie domesticates them. What is supposed to be a sexy getaway in Spain turns into an obstacle course of luggage to be schlepped, co-workers to be dodged, back spasms interrupting the sought-after consummation. Back in London, Segal secures a flat for their tryst, but the two must fix up and refurnish it, and they do, with as much energy and dedication as a married couple restoring an old Victorian.
The twist of the movie, its swerve from romantic comedy to wistful road not taken, is Segal’s honorable decision that he must break things off so that Jackson can move on with her life and find someone who isn’t married. This is foreshadowed when we see the two watching television in their pad, weeping over the ending of Brief Encounter.
But it doesn’t work cinematically since, while Jackson is sexy and interesting, Segal’s character is too much of a nebbish for us to see why she falls so hard for him. His role gets in the way of what should have been Jackson’s movie, with him a minor character in the story of a divorced professional woman. Rather than looking back to Brief Encounter, the movie ought to have looked ahead to Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman.[1]
Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973)
A third movie of 1973 that, like Blume in Love and Scenes from a Marriage, explored the nature of a marriage through its shattering is Divorce His, Divorce Hers. This two and a half hour television production is a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to be Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, married and wounding each other, divorced and wounding each other. The lack of any point to the movie except for its obvious self-referentiality—celebrity actors playing themselves—in this case works as a vacuum that sucks up all kinds of additional elements and performances to fill out its emptiness.
The acting is fine all around, particularly in the case of small parts that seem documentary in their naturalness, especially their son (Mark Colleano) and his girlfriend (Marietta Meade). These threads are intertwined with gobs of mediocre melodrama, Carrie Nye vamping in soap opera gowns, a plot thread about Western economic exploitation of Africa, and gestures toward themes of work-marriage balance and the impact of marital strife and divorce on children. The result is both surreal and tedious. “What am I watching?” and “Why am I watching?” constantly sound in one’s head.
A New York Times profile of the couple as they were filming it suggests that Burton and Taylor felt the same way: “‘We cannot just go on playing ourselves,’ says Richard wearily, to which he adds an immediate rhetorical flourish: ‘Oh, where are the writers to rescue us?’” They would divorce the next year, remarry the year after, and divorce a second time the year after that.
Shampoo (1975)
Shampoo is not a divorce movie, but important to mention as a definitive bookend to these 1970s reflections on the social upheavals of the 1960s. Hal Ashby’s movie gives us California in 1968 as a screwed-up forest of Arden, total license revealing an aching heart and an empty mind. Petulia and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice did so at the time, but most fare of that time would have played Jack Warden’s character in Shampoo for dumb, lecherous laughs. By 1975, the screenplay by Warren Beatty and Robert Townes can sift through the rubble.
There is an occasional deflection to easy politics, liberal Hollywood’s reflexive Republican-bashing in the California of Nixon and Reagan, but otherwise the farce holds brilliantly and packs a punch. Beatty’s sordid innocence in the movie is nothing like virtue, but simply that he is an Adam in a Garden of Eden with no tree of knowledge to worry about, consigned to instinct and appetite and quiet despair.
Normie Warden assumes that there must be some countercultural truth in how Beatty lives, some revolutionary principle better than his own bourgeois hypocrisy. “I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore,” he tells Beatty, enviously. “At least you do what you want.” But Beatty’s truth is what he tells Goldie Hawn about his philandering and betrayal: “Let’s face it: I fucked them all. That’s what I do.”
This is the end of the process we already saw underway back in the 1950s, in A Summer Place, with its announcement that love rather than traditions or norms will henceforth structure social behavior. The goal has been achieved, but turns out to be loveless. “I don’t know what I’m apologizing for,” says Beatty to the stunned Hawn. “So sometimes I fuck ‘em.”
[1] The Paper Chase, also from 1973, places its divorcee—the beautiful Lindsay Wagner—even further in the background.