Word: joan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PLAY IT AS IT LAYS follows Maria Wyeth, an occasional actress and part-time wife of director Carter Lang, on her descent into herself and her surroundings. When Maria (long "i") arrives at the bottom, the finds nothing, but by then who cares? Certainly not she. Based on Joan Didion's same-titled novel, this is a Hollywood film about Hollywood people. Most of them have knowingly ugly souls; all of them are unhappy. Ambition motors them through their non-lives, and a fondly cultivated sense of insouciance cushions the ride. If Los Angeles ever was Paradise, it's lost...
...JOAN DIDION'S SCREENPLAY transfers many of her book's best elements to the film. Besides emphasizing the film's first-person point of view, Maria's soundtrack commentary fills in gaps where dramatization would only waste time. In the book Maria talked about Carter's first films; here we see and use them to piece together her past. Her descriptions of her mentally disturbed daughter, Kate, find visual equivalents in her visits to the institution where Carter has committed their daughter. On the other hand, with the fast-cut flashbacks to Maria's coerced abortion, the style distracts...
...protected by Ingmar Bergman, she had no real chance to make career mistakes. Since being on her own she has made at least two: she signed up for The Night Visitor, a forgettable thriller, and, worse, she threw herself wholeheartedly into a dreadful costume epic called Pope Joan. Her Hollywood agent, Paul Kohner, admits, "It's hard to say yet whether she has any script judgment...
...they may leave something to be desired; but as a lesson in prophetic hindsight, McCall's offered a sample of poems written by entertainers when they were too young to know better. From a twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor: "Loving you,/ Loving you,/ Could be such heavenly bliss..." Joan Crawford, who became an expert at playing distraught ladies, offered this line at age 16: "Where are you?/ My heart cries out in agony..." At eleven, Bob Hope began, "I dreamed I was a circus clown./ I wore a funny suit." In his dream, Hope was caught by a lion...
...segregation," says Adele Allen, Brooklyn-born black president of student government at Wellesley. "When I socialize, I prefer to hear James Brown, not Joan Baez, and when I'm at a party, I prefer to have black men around. This is not segregation; it's a matter of personal taste...