Word: starlet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MAILER'S MONROE is a repository for hoary legends and dirty jokes told about starlets in general. And in the process reveals at least as much of the Mailer that we already knew than any new insight he has provided about his subject. His language is perhaps no flatter than anyone else who tried to write 90,000 words in 60 days, but it is not much better than his account of the Frazier Ali fight which he wrote on deadline for Life. In Marilyn, Mailer coins at least four new words: "fucky" as the description of her earlier roles...
Arriving for the showing of his new film, O Lucky Man!, at the Cannes Film Festival last May, Director Lindsay Anderson was incensed by the typical Cannes display of bared bosoms and battling paparazzi clamoring in front of the theater. He confronted one giggling "starlet" posing for photographers in the doorway and slapped her resoundingly on the bottom. "Get on inside and see the film," he told her, and then turned his wrath on Cannes' organizer. "This is a degenerate festival," he said. "I remember when it was fine. Now it's cheap and disgusting...
...starlet did go inside to see the film, she would have found that Anderson the director reveals as much of his dour, sardonic Scots heritage as Anderson the man does. O Lucky Man!, now on view across the U.S. (TIME, June 18), presents the audience with visions of itself as it might be seen in fun-house mirrors, reality reflected as grotesque fantasy: Big Business in blue suits calmly watching a colleague throw himself from a skyscraper window; Inhuman Science manipulating evolution by transplanting a man's head onto the heaving hulk of a hairy hog. Critics have called...
Anderson rages in his films at the state of modern humanity, deadened by conformity and isolated in a world gone ludicrously amuck. His job, he seems to feel, is to jolt his viewers awake the same way he did the starlet: with a sound moral thwacking. "The artist must always aim beyond the limits of tolerance," he once wrote. "His duty is to be a monster...
Nevertheless, some of the performances are fun to watch. Dyan Cannon plays a brassy, bitchy manager, joyfully screwing Coburn and half the crew. You never know whether to toss Cannon off as the sexy starlet "dumb broad" type, or look for intelligence behind her unabashed flattery. She manages to maintain this tension in her role throughout the film, and Ross uses her well as a counterpoint to more mundane dialogue. Richard Benjamin is the sliding writer, questioning and confused about the cruise and its purposes; Joan Hackett plays his clinging wife; and Mason plays the washed up director with...