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Alan J. Pakula's opening reworks Mulligan's opening in The Rat Race, no more apt manner of signaling his shift from producer to director. The withdrawn student (Wendell Burton) is more comfortable with insects than people, the jolie laide (Liza Minnelli) leaps before his lens ("Hi! Need a model?"), the bus to college runs on whimsy prattle. The kook won't take no for an answer so a romance blooms, their scampering across flowery fields soon betrays hints of morbidity. "The leaves are beautiful." "Because they're dying, huh?" The girl who fancies herself a garrulous life force is in reality fascinated with the quiet of a cemetery, she lies by a tombstone when not recalling Mother's death and Father's grief, the beau can only play tentative psychiatrist. A motel room with a squeaky bed and a broken heater accommodates their first tryst, filmed in long takes for maximum awkwardness. "Somehow or other, when everything's a little bit perfect I get a little bit nervous." Tackling the Solipsistic Oddball subgenre, Pakula showcases his clinical eye by slicing through the cuteness for the emotional damage underneath—within the ploddingly "sensitive" trappings (moony folk warbling, outdoors gauziness), he posits a sham idyll erected on loneliness. Wounded nerviness is already Minnelli's forte, her affecting heroine fabricates pregnancies and sulks in the rain, unleashing her anger amid the splashed beer and scattered feathers of a frat party. Connection turns out to be a fleeting thing for the would-be soulmates, their last reunion has the girl hooded with shadows in a proto-Klute effect. "You're gonna send me back home, aren't you?" Preminger literalizes the wounds of youth the following year with Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. With Tim McIntire, Sandy Faison, and Austin Green.
--- Fernando F. Croce |