I lost track of Henry’s in the late Eighties (seeing one of his films only every few years), since when his New York attitude fell prey to an L.A. shallowness that, in the end, made the films less appealing to anyone who doesn’t live in that L.A. show-biz-sphere. The films he made before that transition was made, and his very first L.A. feature, are very much worth watching, though, because they show his initial instincts led him to a very interesting style that blended drama, comedy, fabulism, and, yes, a street-smart yet highly neurotic New York attitude toward relationships and one’s image of oneself.
Before I discuss his “first five” features (in the manner of those CD collections that contain an artist’s first five albums), I should note that I had some very nice communications with Jaglom in two very different contexts. The first was after a panel discussion about some generic, all-encompassing topic like “The Future of Cinema” at the Alliance Francaise back in the late Eighties.
Jaglom joined a panel that included Sam Fuller and Andrew Sarris. A friend and I spent some time at the after-party (which was somehow open to people like myself, non-members of the Alliance, who bought a public ticket to the panel) asking Sam about the novel he was wonderfully ranting about during the panel (which became his wild espionage saga, Quint’s World).
Jaglom was definitely up for talking about his films and was receptive to my query about the possibility of seeing his first film, A Safe Place, which was seemingly never going to come out on VHS at that time. (It finally made it to DVD in 2010 as part of the Criterion Collection’s set, America Lost and Found: The BBS Story.)
First of all, Henry asked me who I was. I noted I was the editor of the book Movies on TV, the original movie capsule review book — the structure of which was entirely stolen for Maltin’s book TV Movies, which was admittedly better because Maltin actually was an actual film historian and his publisher cooperated with his requests for more space for each edition.
I must admit something here: Myself and the editor who came before me were not paid a great deal of money, and before I wormed my way onto various p.r. lists, we were unable to see most of the films we were reviewing for the book. Thus, several dozen fake reviews, comprised of assumed opinions cribbed from the various published reviews of a certain title, made it into the book each year. (I tried to change this and get on various p.r. lists, but even then, we had no time and $ to rent and watch all the straight-to-video titles.)
Henry, it seems, would look for reviews of his movies in books like Movies on TV (which had a very rich man’s name on it as the editor — he had no film knowledge and contributed nothing to the reviews in each edition; myself and the other editors were his ghostwriters). He thus knew that the editor before me (who was a very good writer but who on several occasions “vamped” out imagined opinions he would form for the fake reviews) had written a cursory review of his film Always that carped about the film but then said that, since Henry had been so nice to Orson Welles, it should be noted that the film was one of Jaglom’s better efforts.
Thus, in my burgeoning discussion with Jaglom, I immediately had to throw up a defense of the book I was working for, which I was trying to “rework” as best I could at the time. He asked what Welles had to do with Always (of course, Jaglom was very good friends with Orson and recorded the best of Orson’s last film appearances, in Someone to Love). I noted that that the prior editor had had some “weird opinions” and that the review would be changed in the next edition. (A promise I kept, reviewing the film after actually watching it on VHS.)
Once that awkward bit was out of the way, Henry then told me to come to his apartment building in the nicest part of Madison Avenue (amid the galleries on Madison in the high Sixties) to pick up a video of A Safe Place that he could lend me. I went there at a specified time and there was a tape of the film with some added press notes for that and the upcoming Someone to Love in an envelope.
I called the phone number he had given me for his NYC apartment (which I believe had been his family apartment before it was his own abode) and thanked him for letting me see the film, which I did like (more on this below). We then spoke for a while, with him giving me info about that film and his involvement with the amazing film company BBS, which finally did receive its just due with the Criterion box. He noted that he had been one of the people called in to edit Easy Rider when Dennis Hopper could not figure a way to cut it down from an epic length he had assembled.
Flash forward several decades, and I became “friends” with Henry on Facebook. I posted about the passing of his brother, “Michael Emil” (the stage name for Michael E. Jaglom) in 2019 and noted that I wished that the sequel for Jaglom’s Sitting Ducks had materialized. Who should supply a reply to that comment but Jaglom, who noted that “We shot the sequel, Ed, called “Lucky Duck,” but it was a mess and I couldn’t put it together into a coherent whole, unfortunately… my fault entirely, but my brother never fully forgave me for it.”
I noted in my initial post about Michael Emil that I met and talked to him for a few moments when I had gone to see two of Henry’s films at the Cinema Village. Michael was hovering around outside the theater when I exited (perhaps he, being the exec producer on the films, was checking the box office?). He was perfectly lovely and did indeed speak with that heavy-heavy NYC accent (and perfect grammar).
A further conversation-in-public with Henry (it is so odd yet welcoming that social media has allowed for fans to have public discussions with people whose work they admire) came about when I posted about the weird case that is The Cincinnati Kid (1965), a film with an impeccable cast and incredible crew that is just lackluster in general. (The answer to this is Sam Peckinpah conceived of the film and was sacked shortly into the filming; the very bland Norman Jewison took over and delivered the retread of The Hustler that the studio wanted in the first place.)
Henry commented on my post, saying “I was on the set with Tuesday, watching them shoot it if you can believe that… the first film I saw being filmed in a Hollywood studio. I knew somehow that something was wrong but couldn’t tell you what it was.” I responded that I didn’t know he knew Tuesday Weld (a deity in the Funhouse) before they made A Safe Place (Jaglom’s first film as a writer-director) together.
He answered, “Yes, we met when both of us were supposedly hypnotized on the stage in a nightclub on the Sunset Strip by someone called Pat Collins, billed as the “Hip Hypnotist” on my first visit to Hollywood in the early 1960s…. I ended up living her for a while in Malibu, then stayed for my first year out here in her apartment at 999 Sunset Blvd (is that right?) on the Strip… What a great girl she was…” He then asked me if I had seen A Safe Place; if I hadn’t, he would send me a copy.
He added, “That goes for anyone else who is reading this, by the way – send me your email address to [Henry’s email] and I’ll send the film along to you….” With that kind of a personal touch, I felt I owed it to Henry’s memory to rewatch his first five and offer a salute to him upon his passing.
*****
A Safe Place (1971) was an incredibly ballsy debut film, as it is only moderately linear and it features major “name” performers, but in roles that could be declared as ciphers unless one relates to the film in an emotional sense rather than an intellectual one. In addition, there is a fabulist aspect to the whole thing that emphasizes that what we’re seeing incorporates the fantasies of the lead character.
That lead character, Noah (Tuesday Weld), is a woman in transition: A newly started relationship with the schlemiel-like Fred (Philip Proctor) plays out while we retreat inside her mind and see her interacting with a magician (Orson Welles) she or may not have known in childhood. Her freefall, which is either toward insanity or to a new kind of freedom, is complicated by the arrival of Mitch (Jack Nicholson), an ex who is charismatic as hell but who seems to relate to her only in sexual terms.
Jaglom based this film on a play that he’d written that had been performed with Karen Black in the lead in 1964. The film, however, is not stagey and theatrical; it is actually the opposite, showing the characters relating in real NYC settings, including Central Park, where Orson’s character is seen doing magic tricks while he recites enigmatic tales (which Jaglom took from the Hassidic stories of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav).
The film seems most inspired by fabulist literature and the works of the great European filmmakers of the Fifties and Sixties who eschewed linear storylines for strong emotion and striking imagery. In interviews Jaglom stated that he wanted the film to reflect the subconscious of Weld’s character — this might have worked well in Europe, but American reviewers and critics (who one assumes would’ve gotten where Jaglom took his inspiration from) were brutal in their responses to the film.
The film’s bad reviews became part of its legend over the years and even Jaglom enjoyed quoting them in later years, because by then Anais Nin had written a piece praising the film to the heavens, saying it was “a perfect fusion, the perfect superimposition of memory, dream illusion, and the grappling with reality.” (The piece can be found here.)
In case that praise was too timid, she added that “all the subtle dreams and fantasies which color our experience are captured here. The inner world of a young becomes as vivid as her outer world. Here is a dimension left out of other films. A new vision, more encompassing, or feeling, tenderness and humor.”
Nin did see the essence of what Jaglom was doing. It’s interesting to note that Jaglom moved away from this kind of “fantasy in realistic situations” after his second film and solely turned to the surface of the situations he was filming.
One may not respond to the film’s “cubist” vision of Noah (whom we learn was named Susan as a child), but what does draw more open-minded viewers into the film is the fact that Jaglom never strays too far away from the four lead characters. He frames them in tight close-up and, as a result, we are ultimately seduced by them — although Philip Proctor’s Fred, who doesn’t possess the “magic” of the other characters, doesn’t seem to be in on the seduction, and thus dwells at a remove from the action.
Not so the other three leads, who are primarily shot looking straight into the camera. Nicholson was the one constant in the BBS films (save Last Picture Show) — he became a star thanks to Easy Rider and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, wrote the first BBS production (Head), directed another (Drive, He Said), and starred in Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens.
The self-assuredness that became the hallmark of many of the characters he played in the Seventies is already in full effect in his scenes in Safe Place. He’s a charmer, all right, but he’s also clearly the kind of guy who just drops into a woman’s apart to get some sex and then cuts out before the sun rises. His Mitch is a seducer who admits he’s a shit but still is so damned charming that Noah immediately throws over Fred when he reappears in her apt.
Orson’s magician character, sporting an Eastern European Yiddish-inflected accent, is of course bigger than life. Orson himself always loomed large over the American cinema, but he also was one of the great character performers (I’m amazed he didn’t wear a fake nose for this appearance, something he loved to do). Here he is a character who keeps the film moored into fantasy, as Noah visits him as an adult but we also see her interacting with him as a child (only a child’s hands are seen in these moments). Orson was nothing if not a craftsman, and so one can see the delight he’s taking in playing the role — and, of course, doing the magic tricks.
The film functions beautifully as a study of Noah and of Tuesday Weld herself. Yes, now I know that Jaglom had dated with her (lived with her, even!), I understand his desire to capture Weld as she was, a grown woman (no longer a teenage “sex kitten”) who was morphing from the girl who enraptured in Lord Love a Duck and Pretty Poison into the fine actress who was the heart of Play It As It Lays and the scene-stealing sister in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Henry shot Tuesday in extremely tight close-ups, which would’ve been awkward with any less of a magnetic performer, but here seems natural. Since we are entering into her subconscious, we have to view her up-close. A lot of her character consists of riddles (thus the end where Jaglom leaves off-screen what has happened to her — fantasy or reality?) but we are constantly confronted by the reality of Weld herself. We can choose to recoil from this (as many of the critics did) or can, rather, see here the qualities that made Weld the most under-praised actress of her generation. (Although her fans know to this day what she was all about onscreen — sheer rebellion against the usual depictions of heroines in American movies.)
*****
Tracks (1976) is the biggest surprise in Jaglom’s filmography. It has a tight structure, being a “road movie” set in a train going cross-country, and it features some intense nightmare sequences experienced by the lead character, Jack Felan, a Vietnam veteran (Dennis Hopper) who is on a special assignment to help bury a friend and fellow soldier who has died.
The film fits comfortably into the “maverick era” of Seventies film in terms of its tone and the topic it explores, namely the tangled mind of a veteran. It also is very much a maverick film because Jaglom found independent financiers willing to produce it, after the critical debacle of A Safe Place. As a result of it being an independent production, it could also be what Jaglom wanted it to be — a drama with moments of comedy, a scripted film with a great amount of ad-libbed dialogue, and a character study that also serves as a very solid ensemble piece.
The set-up is indeed as simple as can be: Jack Falen is accompanying his friend’s coffin to a cemetery in the dead soldier’s home town. The only problem is that, as the film moves on, we find Hopper telling different stories about the man in the coffin (from his being best friends with the man, to him fighting alongside the dead man, to him never having met the guy). This uncertainty is reflected in the use of handheld camera throughout the picture, giving an unsteady feel to the proceedings as we watch Hopper’s mind unravel (and few actors were as adept at showing a mind unravel as Hopper).
The characters on the train with Falen are involved in some very light moments as well as some heavy ones. Dean Stockwell plays a playboy desperate to make time with the single women on the journey. Taryn Power and Topo Swope are the women who Hopper and Stockwell are looking to bed down with (as this is a sleeper train with separate compartments). Zach Norman and Michael Emil play bickering characters whose scenes are the funniest in the film, as the two make a perfect comedy team. Richard Romanus (of Mean Streets) plays a waiter who works on the train who is also on the make. And actor-director Paul Williams (no, not that one) plays a tarot card reader who enthralls a bunch of young women (who include a young Sally Kirkland).
Jaglom deftly moves from one group of passengers to another, with the film’s tone changing from scene to scene. The sequences between Norman and Emil are genuinely funny, while the flirtation sequences sketch the characters quickly and solidly. The primary tool Jaglom used here was the resources of his cast, who are clearly ad-libbing in certain sequences, and thus creating their characters as we watch. This is entertaining when it comes to comedy but it’s most impressive with Hopper, who interacts with the comedic characters but is always 100% dramatic when left on his own.
The other tool besides ad-libbing (by, it should be noted, very talented individuals) that Jaglom leans heavily on here is the use of vintage music from the WWII era in America. He had already used music of the Thirties and Forties in A Safe Place, but there it just seems like a garnish; here it contributes to the definition of Hopper’s character as a damaged person — a guy who carries around a tape recorder playing the patriotic songs from “the Good War,” as well as the saddest and most beautiful ballads whose brain is imploding, as he begins to see a series of nightmare fantasies.
Tracks is one of the more unique dramas in movie history, as it actually spawned a comedy team: Norman and Emil were both producers on the film (under their real names, Howard Zuker and Michael E. Jaglom) and were arguing all the time about figures, so Jaglom asked them to stage arguments about different topics in front of the camera. Norman was an actor, while Emil was not — but both clicked enough onscreen as a comedy team that Jaglom spun them off into a great vehicle. About which more below….
In the end, the most important element in Tracks is Hopper, who gives a terrific performance and single-handedly ignites the film toward the end. It has been noted elsewhere, but one can’t help thinking of his later turn as the photographer in Apocalypse Now, where Coppola was utilizing Hopper’s gonzo energy to bring a menace to the final scenes of the film. There, he is a supporting character that depicts the madness of Vietnam; in Tracks, he is the central focus and gives a performance that is Oscar-worthy (if the Oscars were actually given to performers who earned them, in films that weren’t nearly always big-ticket showcases).
*****
Sitting Ducks (1980) makes for the best one-two punch that Jaglom had in his career. Following the taut and disturbing drama of Tracks, he made what is surely his funniest comedy, a crooks-on-the-run farce that starred Zack Norman and Henry’s brother Michael Emil. Like Tracks, it is a road movie, but this time the journey is a lot sillier and a lot less menacing.
The films follows Norman and Emil as they rip off a betting syndicate and, after intercepting cash going on the run, from NYC down to Miami. On the way, they hire an aspiring singer-songwriter (Richard Romanus) as their chauffeur and bond with two very friendly women, one a yoga expert (Patrice Townsend) and the other a neurotic ex-waitress (Irene Forrest). The joy of the film comes from the interaction between the actors, who are, again, mostly ad-libbing their lines based on concepts given to them by Jaglom. One of the revelations made in the third act adds wonderfully to the silliness that pervades the whole picture: We learn that both of the women are in fact hit women out to kill Norman and Emil; they are working under a mostly quiet, mysterious type who is seen brandishing a movie camera (Jaglom himself).
The road movie setup makes for some interesting locations, from rundown motels to main streets in small towns. The sense of humor, though — and this is indeed key to this phase in Jaglom’s filmmaking — is very much a NYC sensibility. Emil was a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker (a businessman by trade in real life), while Norman was an ex-standup comedian who became a film producer and distributor in the Seventies.
Together, the two relentlessly bicker with the perfect timing of a comedy team. In the Q&A that is on the DVD for the film, Jaglom reveals that he pushed his brother’s buttons to get him to argue with Norman throughout the shoot. One particularly crazy sequence finds an enthusiastic Norman climbing into the bathtub while Emil is already bathing; the scene means nothing to the plot but it is a great moment where Emil is clearly uncomfortable being that close to Norman.
Jaglom prepared him for the scene, insinuating that one of the two female leads would be coming into the bathtub, but he also noted that he was not going to stop shooting footage no matter what Emil said to him. (Henry counted, he says, on his brother’s “homophobia” and dislike of being too close to other men.)
Sitting Ducks was a surprise hit that played around America in various-sized theaters. Jaglom’s films were made on such small budgets that good reviews meant a film would make back what was spent on it and would immediately be in the black. Ducks might’ve been inherently Nu Yawk in its humor, but its light touch and the camaraderie between its stars made it attractive to viewers around the country.
In the same Q&A Jaglom notes that Ducks was not only a hit with the public but also with comic filmmakers Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. He said both men were disappointed he never made another broad comedy. Pencil me in as another disappointed viewer who wishes that Jaglom had made more broadly farcical comedies.
*****
Now, for two “bonus” reviews of shorter items that Jaglom directed. The first is a 50-minute film that he shot in 1973, which is called “My Brother’s Sex Life” on IMDB and “Michael Emil’s Sex Life” on the Sitting Ducks DVD that Jaglom released.
It’s comprised of a long interview with Michael E. Jaglom, wherein he discusses how “good at sex” he is. An odd piece, for sure, since it’s a younger brother interviewing his older brother about his sex habits. It’s also odd because, although Jaglom assembled it and mentioned in interviews that he had shown it to people in L.A., it has no credits of any kind and was seemingly shot from “short ends,” that is, unused film stock that was left over from a larger project.
The film contains Michael lecturing Henry about various sex-related topics in rants that are found in Sitting Ducks and later Jaglom films. The only problem here is that Zack Norman (or anyone else) isn’t around to contest Michael’s pronouncements — although Henry does ask a few therapy-worthy questions of his brother, who informs him that he doesn’t believe in the usefulness of therapy.
So, why and how was Michael “good at sex” (with the presumption being that he means “very good at sex”)? He claims that it’s because he gives a lot of attention to satisfying the woman he’s with. He declares that it is also because he’s a habitual masturbator — doing it at the least a half-dozen times a day, but upwards of a dozen on other days. At one point he describes his position in sex as that of the “participant-observer” who is keeping aware of what’s going on while being intimate with a partner.
One can accept or reject anything Michael says, but the truest statement he makes is that he’s “a very compulsive person.” He notes the competitive nature he brought to playing chess, learning the martial arts, and weight training. Anytime Henry nails him on the nature of his compulsions, Michael casts off the question, saying “That’s another subject.”
Thus, if we get one thing from Michael, it’s the level of OCD that he devoted to his passions, sex included. However, Henry ends up having him discuss are his actual feelings about his partners, which don’t sound as female-empowering as they initially did when he emphasized the female orgasm.
First of all, he mentions “training” women to enjoy sex more, which does indicate the lack of affection going on in his super-competitive mindset. Michael also notes that he has been “suffering from doubt” in recent years (he was around 42 when this interview was done), because one of his exes started questioning his constantly touting his prowess at sex. He brags at one point that he has had periods where he’s had multiple lovers, which was a pain, since the “scheduling” of it all was difficult.
The key reveal is one Michael states with some ambivalence, but it pretty much explains the nature of the sex he’s telling us he has so much of. He says he doesn’t enjoy cunnilingus and has performed it on “very few girls.” He proclaims that he would do it if a woman wanted it, but it’s clear that he’s not a fan of it, meaning that when he talks about giving the woman an orgasm he’s meaning with the penis or the fingers. He also notes when Henry presses him on the subject that he’s “not very happy” with his life such as it is.
This is all pretty intimate for a discussion with a man who, to be brutally honest, was not a matinee idol. Emil was a stocky man who had a very thick Nu Yawk accent (with a touch of a Lower East Side yiddish sound, although to my knowledge no Jaglom ever lived on the LES). He also began to wear a really obvious combover when he lost his hair.
These are all great elements for half of a comedy team, but as noted above, there is no one puncturing Michael’s speechifying here, as there was in Sitting Ducks (and Jaglom’s following feature, below). Instead, we get to see a very colorful gent boasting about his sexual prowess but, as he keeps talking, the “seams” begin to show through what seem like rants Michael had been doing for years at that point. Thus, the film is one of the odder Jaglom creations and certainly one of the weirder “home movies” I’ve seen, since rarely has a filmmaker discussed such bizarrely personal items with his older brother, and then released the film to the public.
*****
Now, onto the only “work for hire” that Jaglom made during his near-half-century of filmmaking:
National Lampoon’s Movie Madness (shot 1981, released ’83) found Jaglom directing two genre parodies that were to go into an anthology feature that was the much-awaited (and then ignored) Lampoon production to follow Animal House. According to an online source, Orson Welles suggested that Jaglom take this assignment, to show he could direct other people’s writing. A pretty unfortunate choice, even though this film had some notable comedy writers in the five-person scripting team. (Among them, Tod Carroll and Shary Flenniken.) One of Jaglom’s two segments, a disaster-movie spoof called “The Bomb,” was deemed so bad it wasn’t included in the film. (And with what was accepted, one wonders how bad that segment could’ve been.)
Music-video director Bob Giraldi helmed the two other segments, which are quite odd, since one plays like a deranged sitcom (an elongated self-improvement sketch starring Peter Riegert, in which the only notable sequence is one with Diane Lane as a teenage model) and the other is a bizarro take-off on Harold Robbins’ type (starring Ann Dusenberry as a woman who rises in the business world by sleeping around).
Given the humanitarian content in his own films, it’s odd to see Jaglom directing a piece of very dark humor, which is what “Municipalians” is. It’s a parody of rookie-cop films, with Robby Benson playing a ridiculously wholesome rookie who is (of course) paired with a jaded veteran cop, played by the great noir god Richard Widmark. One running joke finds Benson being continually shot in different areas of his body, and other gags include a cop shooting himself in the head and a neighborhood strangler completing one of his strangulations as Benson decides how best to arrest him.
Thus, what we have here is a gag-filled version of the same sort of stuff that Robert Aldrich dealt with in the cop pic The Choirboys (1977), which had numerous segments that were punctuated by grotesque jokes (although one gets the impression that Aldrich wanted to emphasize just how ugly the world the characters live in could be, a la Kiss Me Deadly).
There are moments that do work in this mini-film, but the only conclusion that appears to have been written for it is Benson turning into a worse version of Widmark’s character. The piece as it stands just ends with Benson (or a stuntman) doing a bunch of Keaton-esque rolls in the middle of a street. No final dialogue, no summation of the silliness, just his character in the street and then… roll the credits.
As with many of these Mad magazine movie-spoof pictures, the main thing that causes some of the jokes (put an emphasis on “some”) is that there is a great number of talented people in the cast for this mini-film: Christopher Lloyd as the strangler, Elisha Cook as a weaselly little informant, standup Barry Diamond as a drug addict, Bill Kirchenbauer (“Fernwood 2-Night”) and Irene Forrest as a bickering couple, and Henny Youngman as Christopher Lloyd’s lawyer. (Harry Reems made the credits, but he’s barely onscreen.)
In any case, "Municipalians" is certainly the path not taken by Jaglom. One wonders what his career would’ve been like if he had had a better script to direct in ’81. He could’ve had one of those “I’ll do two for them and then one for me” careers like Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, and Steven Soderbergh.
*****
Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) is a peculiar mixture of deadpan comedy and shrill drama. It focuses on a relationship that seemingly can’t work, but it is far from Minnie and Moskowitz and Modern Romance, which both tackled that subject and eventually made us believe in the unlikely couple at the center of each picture.
Karen Black stars as a nightclub singer who winds up in a romance with Michael Emil, who is sketched here to be even more peculiar than he was in Sitting Ducks. Supporting this unlikely romantic duo is a bunch of characters who seem weird for weird’s sake (as with a gent who performs on the streets of Manhattan with a trained pigeon).
The techniques that worked in the preceding two films are gone here — in their place are a series of ungainly zooms across city streets that isolate the people we’re watching, presumably in an attempt to show the “loneliness of the big city.” The NYC locations are indeed one of the best things about the film as other random elements, like the inclusion of family home movies (Jaglom family home movies, showing Michael and Henry’s parents), take one out of the comic aspect of the film, which is its actual raison d’etre.
Unfortunately, the comedic partner that Emil has here (Martin Harvey Friedberg) isn’t as lively as Zack Norman and was actually funnier in “The Municipalians.” Oddly, the person who might’ve been able to carry off cross-talk with Emil is seen in only one scene for a few minutes — a young, post-“Fridays” Larry David, who has one significant line (about him knowing he’ll be rich when he can take a cab anywhere; I’m assuming Larry long ago passed that threshold of personal wealth).
When I interviewed Karen Black for the Funhouse, I asked her about Cherry Pie, inquiring whether she did a great deal of improvisation. Her very quick answer was a retort to the effect that “if one doesn’t improvise, Mr. Jaglom doesn’t have a film.” She and Emil do indeed improvise both their romantic moments and their even more frequent arguments. The problem is, as stated above, it’s very hard to believe in this particular romantic coupling, as neither actor is able to manifest any seeming affection for the other.
Thus, when the lead couple seems like an unhappy mismatch — rather than the adorable one we’re supposed to believe in — it’s hard to imagine them spending a good deal of time together, never mind being romantically involved. Emil “fit” into Sitting Ducks as an oddball character type. In Cherry Pie he is supposed to be eventually accepted as a romantic lead.
And while Black has some really nice moments (including a few where she sings in a nearly empty nightclub), her being on-edge throughout most of her scenes does become wearying. As a major quirk, Jaglom had her act paranoid throughout the picture; there is a narrative reason for this that is revealed toward the end, but it is still an off-putting aspect to her character.
*****
I will close off this piece with Henry’s first very L.A. film. I know that one of my central theses here is that Jaglom was on stronger ground when he was a “NYC filmmaker,” but I realize that is disproven by the schizo nature of Cherry Pie and New Year’s Day (1989), a later NYC film (notable online mostly for a nude scene involving David Duchovny). These two films suffer from some of the same problems that were found in Henry’s L.A. filmmaking of the late Nineties through the 2010s: “actor’s turns” that weren’t warranted, a telescoped world view that often amounts to theater on film, and striving for feminist messages that didn’t “click” on a dramatic level.
But Always (1985, retitled by Henry “Always… but not forever” on his DVD release) is a true delight that found Jaglom making one of the all-time great movies about a broken heart and the thoughts the broken-hearted have about the person that they desperately want back in their lives. As could be guessed from the above accounts of Henry’s films, the ensemble here is a combination of people playing fictional roles and several playing themselves, albeit with fictional names. (Henry and his ex Patrice Townsend are “David” and “Judy” here.)
The film begins with Henry’s character remembering when his wife told him she was leaving him. After that sequence is acted out we are in the “present” once again, where the couple are ready to sign divorce papers but act so affectionate with each other, the compassionate notary they’ve hired tells them he wants them to take more time to think about the divorce. That odd twist comes before the film’s main contrivance: that Townsend has gotten sick from the fish that Jaglom cooked for her and she must stay in their former house with him until she recovers from the sickness. It also just happens to be July 4th weekend, and so she is present for a party that involves various friends of theirs visiting and sleeping over at the house.
The core of the ensemble are three couples: the ones that’s getting divorced, a longtime married couple (Alan Rachins and Joanna Frank, a real-life husband and wife) who are tethered to each other, and a younger couple who are at the start of their relationship.
The scenes that introduce each character seem contrived, but the film hits its stride as the conversations between Jaglom and Townsend get more and more emotional. These moments are Jaglom at his best, mining relationships for moments where it’s possible to identify with both characters in the break-up. In the process, we also begin to sympathize with the other characters, including the wife played by Joanna Frank (who was very impressive under the name “Joanna” in Richard Beymer’s The Innerview (1973)), who tells David that chocolate contains a chemical that makes a person feel like they are in love; he walks in on her in the bathtub with Swiss Miss powdered cocoa poured in the bath water, so she can regain the feeling of being in love.
The party sequence turns everything around, as suddenly we have a number of characters to watch, and Jaglom’s party guests include some very talented ad-libbers, including Bob Rafelson as a horny neighbor, Andre Gregory dispensing wisdom (as he was prone to do), and, of course, Michael Emil.
Jaglom’s zooms are smoother and not as distracting here as they were in Cherry Pie. There are also very precise cuts between different sets of characters, ensuring that we don’t grow tired of the different couples that are spotlighted.
Whenever one’s interest does flag for a moment or two, one notices just how luxurious Jaglom’s house is — a swimming pool in the large backyard, of course, but also a functional juke box (playing, of course, Thirties and Forties ballads) and a skee-ball machine in the living room. (This matter of noticing just how rich neurotic characters are is not unique to Jaglom; Woody Allen’s lesser films do often overwhelm with the cavernous spaces his misguided lovers inhabit.)
Throughout, one gets the impression that Jaglom crafted this film as a piece of therapy but he also would’ve liked to have actually won Townsend back in real life. At one point we reach the core of the matter (since Townsend’s character hasn’t really conveyed why she left him) when she finally says with much emotion that being married to him meant she had to “submerge” herself in his pursuits (no doubt referring to Henry’s films) and lost her sense of self.
At the film’s end, Jaglom breaks the “David” character and speaks directly to the camera, telling a story about how he won competitions as a child to see who could stay under the water longest. He notes he did this by nearly drowning himself, just to make certain he won the contests.
He then declares that he could have Townsend come into the room as she did at the beginning of the film, this time to say that she was wrong to leave and that she wants to be with him, and will never leave him again. “Maybe I should do that — I could do that, you know, because I’m making this movie. So I could make it end that way if I wanted to.”
He then dictates the lines he’d love to hear her say and we cut to intentionally mismatched (via lighting and angle) close-ups of Townsend reading the lines to him with a broad smile, as if to acknowledge that they are merely lines of dialogue. She ends the recitation with the phrase, “Happy ending. Happy ending, baby.” Indicating that she as an actress has given the director the scene he wanted, but they are still not going to get back together.
He then addresses the audience again to explain that the point of all this was to find a way to be happy, to give oneself “permission to be happy.” He wishes that for her (by looking in the direction of her shots) and then for himself. And then we see Henry, taking a bath with Swiss Miss in the bath water, as James Taylor’s “The Secret of Life” plays under the credits.
This quietly and sublimely emotional finale is one of Jaglom’s finest moments. His later films contained many indulgences — and many, too many, broad turns by the actors, primarily whomever he was connected to romantically at the time of production. But the end of Always is a beautifully rendered goodbye to a lover, and a relationship. Thus it serves as a fitting farewell to an indie filmmaker who stuck to his guns for a half a century.
Sometimes the result was less than met the eye and sometimes it was as unexpected as — well, a bathtub filled with Swiss Miss.
