In the previous post, I talked about Elliott Gould and the “Nice Jewish Bad Boys” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A distinguished member of that club is Richard Benjamin, another curious leading man who played several Jewish anti-heroes including Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus, Harold Weiss in The Steagle, and the granddaddy of all psychosexually dysfunctional American Jews, Alexander Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Though possessed of a conventional attractiveness, Benjamin’s facial features look stylized, making him at times resemble an Assyrian wall painting or a Vulcan or a blue jay. He is certainly the most Sephardic looking of Ashkenazi Jewish actors. His typical manner and expression are those of the wily boy—not Gould’s mama’s boy, but a kid both foxy and agog at the wonders of the world. His height was 6’ 2” but he does not seem so tall because his physical energy is self-contained, not slack but still un-menacing.
Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)
Diary of a Mad Housewife ends with Carrie Snodgrass at group therapy, trying to decide whether or not she will divorce Benjamin, and being yelled at by the other members of the session. Everyone in the movie except Snodgrass is horrible, and Benjamin is especially disturbing as her sadistic husband, one of the two controlling, narcissistic monsters in Snodgrass’s life. (The other is Frank Langella as Snodgrass’s equally abusive lover.)
Based on a book by Sue Kaufman, a Vassar graduate and suicide, the movie confuses feminism with bourgeois self-hatred and pointless misery. It fails as comedy and social satire, but pushed further might work as a kind of horror movie, having more in common with Rosemary’s Baby than with, say, An Unmarried Woman. Watching it, you spend the first half wanting to tell Snodgrass “Run! Get out of there!” By the second half, though, you’re just exhausted watching the masochistic display.
Snodgrass is excellent, though, and you get to see a loft party with Alice Cooper and his band. Benjamin is also excellent in his villainous role, not a Nice Jewish Bad Boy, but a vicious (and not discernably Jewish) man. After emotionally torturing Snodgrass for the whole film, he confesses to her at the end that he has ruined them both financially, is on the verge of being fired from his job, and has been having an affair. “Do you want a divorce,” he asks, still full of himself, “or do you think we could pick up the pieces and maybe work out a better marriage than we ever had?”
The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971)
While so many of the movies of the 1960s are symptomatic of the hypersexualization of American culture and the near-impossibility for men to hold to norms of marital fidelity, the early 1970s (heralded by Paul Mazursky’s end-of-1960s landmark Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) begin to reflect more critically on this “state of affairs” rather than merely celebrate or emblematize it.
In The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, Benjamin confesses to his wife his near constant lusts for the sexually available women moving through his world, some of which he has acted on. His wife (Joanna Shimkus), urged on by his wife’s disapproving sister and her husband (Elizabeth Ashley and Adam West), is understandably planning to divorce him. This is not played for laughs, but seeks instead a kind of off-kilter honesty.
In the end, Benjamin and Shimkus decide to recommit to a marriage, an institution for which no one any longer knows the rules. This seems to be the movie’s point, and it wants to finish with a sense of new social horizons and unpredictable uplift. Yet Benjamin telling his newly accepting wife that he fantasizes about sex with Eskimo women isn’t quite the welcome answer to the Sexual Revolution the filmmakers want it to be.
One Is A Lonely Number (1972)
Did they have Botox in the 1970s? I wouldn’t have thought so before I saw Trish Van Devere in One Is A Lonely Number. The upper half of her face is as unmoving as the Aristotelian God. Bland and doll-like, Van Devere sucks the life out of this movie about a woman whose husband leaves her. And there is a good deal of life to be sucked, thanks to Michel Hugo’s gentle cinematography and stand-out performances by old hands Melvyn Douglas and Janet Leigh. But the likeable naturalness of Douglas and Leigh only accentuates the unnerving artificiality of Van Devere.
The opening scene, with her husband packing a box of his things and announcing his exit from their (thankfully childless) marriage to a disbelieving Van Devere, suggests some kind of avant-garde performance, as both characters speak like expressionless automatons. “What about the Jamesons,” she asks, “they’re expecting us at their party?”
“You go. You always liked their parties.”
“What’ll I tell them?”
“Tell them the truth.”
“What is the truth, James?”
“We’re getting a divorce.” (Sinister harpsichord notes. Opening credits begin as he descends the stairs and heads toward the door.)
But this is no Brechtian technique, but an inexplicably stilted part of an inexplicably bad movie. A curious waystation, One Is A Lonely Number provides all the elements of the 1970s divorce movie, and in particular of the divorced woman’s movie: the husband’s infidelity, the economic and legal challenges of divorce, the newly single woman’s contending with first rapist and then nice guy, the temptations of bitterness and misandry, the establishment of a post-marital existence. But all these ingredients are thrown raw into a bowl and stirred haphazardly with the Barbie doll that is the leading actress.
This was director Mel Stuart’s first movie after another confused divorce movie I Love My Wife (see previous post) and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Like a few movies of the time, it has a Michel Legrand score that is better than the film. A short story by Rebecca Morris, “The Good Humor Man,” is credited as the film’s basis. Morris’s story, collected with other other semi-autobiographical fictions in a self-published 2017 anthology How The Camp Fire Girls Won World War II, is an understated evocation of a New York City summer (the movie changes the location to San Francisco) and a new divorcee’s disorientation. There might be a good movie to be got out of the story, with its chronicle of summer life at a public swimming pool in an Italian neighborhood, but One Is A Lonely Number isn’t it.
Stuart and Van Devere must share blame with David Seltzer, who wrote the screenplay. Van Devere’s character refuses to accept her husband’s wish for a divorce, even after she receives proof of his infidelity and current relationship with another woman. She hires a lawyer, contests the divorce, arranges to destroy her husband financially, and forces him to return from Reno to San Francisco for a court case, to which her lawyer has subpoenaed her best friend.
In the final minutes, Van Devere not only announces that she no longer wants her husband or his money, she acts virtuously surprised that anyone had thought otherwise, and blithely walks out on her lawyer and her friend as if she had not requested the whole court case. Director and screenwriter do not seem to have noticed that their plot does not give us a struggling divorcee, but a creepy narcissist.
Airport (1970)
Immensely successful at the box office, Airport was considered to be a throwback, a popular, big budget and star-studded popcorn movie, a lowbrow critical embarrassment, and perhaps a revenge of Old Hollywood on New. Yet it is also a reminder that the erosion of marital norms was a feature of Old Hollywood, not New. The movie ends with Burt Lancaster, whose bitchy wife is divorcing him, pairing off with Jean Seberg, while Dean Martin’s wife realizes that he is leaving her for Jacqueline Bisset, the stewardess he got pregnant during their affair. This is a happy ending, mind you.