By the end of the 1970s we enter something like our current dispensation in which divorce in film is more of a given, rather than necessarily being the central problem that drives the plot. I’ll talk about this shift in the next couple of posts, but here I want to file away a couple of odds and ends from 1976 that precede this shift. One film holds to the longstanding divorce-and-remarriage plot, albeit in an unusual setting. The other is a last gasp of the Hollywood marriage comedy in which the couple wrestles with the upheavals and temptations of the counterculture. Both are bad movies, but this bit of housecleaning might help us better identify the transition we’ll soon see taking place.
Pipe Dreams (1976)
Midnight train to . . . Alaska? Pipe Dreams is a relationship melodrama starring singer Gladys Knight. As their divorce becomes official, Knight follows ex-husband Barry Hankerson (then her husband in real life) to the Trans-Alaska pipeline town of Valdez. (Much of the film was shot on location.) The exes try to patch things up, interspersed episodically with the doings of the other characters—prostitutes, pilots, and heavy-drinking pipeline workers.
The dialogue, direction, and most of the acting is amateurish, though Knight is winsome and Sally Kirkland solid in a small role as a kindly whore. The few memorable aspects of the movie, apart from some Alaskan scenery, come, like much of the movie, out of nowhere. There is a grisly scene in which one of the prostitutes dies after a wire-hanger abortion. In another scene, Knight and Hankerson, having remarried, decide to have sex out of doors in January, in a section of oil pipeline. At the end, Knight and Hankerson return to the contiguous US to raise their daughter.
At the time it was made, Pipe Dreams was a rare divorce-and-remarriage movie with black principals, yet race is not at any point raised explicitly as an issue in the movie. The production seems like a curious accident, or questionable bet on Knight’s star power.
I Will… I Will… For Now (1976)
Despite brilliant and incisive meditations on the institution of marriage under the social and psychic strains of the counterculture—from Petulia and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to Blume in Love and Shampoo—Hollywood would continue to serve up helpings of the hackneyed comedy, stale even before the Summer of Love was over, in which short skirts and changing sexual mores give priapic men a license to slobber and behave idiotically.
As discussed in a previous post, Norman Panama directed an execrable instance of this in the 1969 How to Commit Marriage. Seven years later, the sixty-two year old Panama co-wrote and directed a retread of this squares vs. hippies, divorce-and-remarriage comedy in I Will… I Will… For Now, ever so slightly updated for the 1970s. Elliot Gould and Diane Keaton have been divorced for a few years and, although she is romantically involved with Paul Sorvino, the ex-spouses for some reason can’t seem to quit each other. Whenever they try to reconcile, though, they fall into the sort of inane bickering one finds in a bad sitcom.
A possible solution comes when they attend the wedding of Keaton’s hip younger sister, a Californian “me decade” ceremony that redefines marriage as a one-year legal contract, renewable (or not) as both parties decide. Gould and Keaton decide to try a six-month-or-bust version. In order to ensure that it fails, Sorvino contrives to send them to a sex research institute in Malibu where temptations abound—including Victoria Principal—and limits are non-existent.
Two steps away from soft porn or some rejected Italian sex comedy, this moronic movie was made by Brut Productions, a film company owned by Fabergé cosmetics. It feels like a tax write-off. Yet the three leads give it their all, especially Gould, who may be riding his career downward here and making a mockery of better work like Bob & Carol…, but nevertheless seems like he is having fun. Which is good, because he has to say lines like: “Lou, you gotta help me. I don’t know what to do. I still love that hard-nosed little dumpling!”