Tag: Harold Robbins

The Lonely Lady

THE LONELY LADY (1983) 1/2*
The Lonely Lady is one of the all-time great stinker movies, 91 minutes of unpleasant characters in unsavory relationships with unbelievably bad actors speaking dialogue that should have never been uttered or ever written in the first place.

Like the (believe it or not) even more awful, killer Santa picture Silent Night, Deadly Night, The Lonely Lady potentially takes the heat off viewers by undercutting a procession of controversial scenes with unintentional humor. I could see hooting and howling in derisive laughter at the performances and the dialogue throughout Silent Night, Deadly Night and The Lonely Lady.

I found myself appalled more than anything else throughout The Lonely Lady, so I was basically too appalled to laugh.

The Lonely Lady especially lays it on thick whenever the title character — aspiring young screenwriter Jerilee Randall, played by the immortal Pia Zadora, though she’s never lonely — expresses her outrage at her perpetual exploitation by Hollywood writers, directors, actors, and producers, every one of them sexist pigs who just nonstop use and abuse her.

At the same time, however, the camera lingers on this exploitation from the rape by garden hose early on in the picture to some of the least sexy movie sex ever captured on celluloid.

On top of all that, Zadora’s real-life husband, Israeli multimillionaire industrialist Meshulam Riklis, funded Butterfly and The Lonely Lady with both pictures starring none other than Zadora. Legend has it that Riklis bought a Golden Globe award for his wife and her performance in Butterfly.

Zadora beat out Elizabeth McGovern and Howard E. Rollins Jr. in Ragtime, Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, Rachel Ward in Sharky’s Machine, and Craig Wasson in Four Friends, all five better-received performances in better-received films.

It remains inconceivable that Zadora — who made her motion picture debut in the 1964 cult film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians — won that award on her own merits.

Riklis was more than 30 years older than Zadora, and that’s not any different than the age gap between Jerilee and her much older husband, veteran Hollywood hack screenwriter Walter Thornton (Lloyd Bochner), in The Lonely Lady.

All those factors combine to make Jerilee’s speech at the Academy Awards — highlighted by that risible line I don’t suppose I’m the only one who’s had to fuck her way to the top! — the absolute worst scene in a movie populated by predominantly bad scenes.

Most of them involve Jerilee sleeping her way through some of the ugliest men imaginable.

Let’s take a look at one more scene that epitomizes The Lonely Lady.

Jerilee and Walter argue outside their Beverly Hills home, near the swimming pool seen first in one of the film’s most appalling scenes.

Jerilee: Walter? Walter, come to bed.
Walter: Haven’t you had enough wine? Go sleep it off.
J: If you’ll come with me.
[W turns away.]
J: I’m trying to say sorry.
W: With a head full of drink!
J: We don’t have to make love.
W: Thank you.
J: We could talk. We need to talk.
W: Why didn’t you go off with Dacosta? He would’ve enjoyed it.
[W picks up the garden hose that raped J earlier in the film.]
W: Or is this more your kick?

That’s even worse than the argument between Kathryn Harrold and Luciano Pavarotti in Yes, Giorgio that culminated in the infamous line I don’t want to be watered on by Fini.

That garden hose, in fact, might have once belonged to Fini.

The Lonely Lady flopped so badly that, thankfully, Hollywood never adapted one of Harold Robbins’ trashy novels again.

Now, I call that a happy ending.

Bloodline (1979)

BLOODLINE (1979) *
Bloodline, a.k.a. Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, tries its hand at several fiction genres and fails mightily at every single one of them.

Let’s see here, we have the always popular Woman in Danger, murder mystery, police procedural, and the film adaptation of a literary potboiler that revolves around the rich and the shameful, predominantly shameful anyway, in lush international jet set surroundings. It also throws in a snuff film style murder every 30 minutes.

The great British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-93) proves to be the only redeeming factor at play during Bloodline and she’s responsible for the one star rating. She brings a touch of class to the proceedings. At that point in her career, Hepburn rarely did movies and focused more of her time on her family. Considering the dubious nature of Bloodline, her first and only R-rated movie, she should have devoted even more time to her family. After all, Hepburn made her fame in such films as Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and My Fair Lady, productions far removed from the cheap thrills and tawdry exploitation that Bloodline tenders at its best and worst. Hepburn and Bloodline director Terence Young made the 1967 psychological thriller Wait Until Dark and that’s much, much, much better and way, way, way more suspenseful than Bloodline.

Maybe, just maybe I have an instant great distaste for adaptations made from the fiction of such writers as Sheldon (1917-2007), Harold Robbins (1916-97), and Jacqueline Susann (1918-74), who are said to have authored popular novels or works better understood by the unwashed masses than the snooty literary critics. I have not read their work, but having watched Valley of the Dolls and Bloodline, both trashy productions, I’ll stick being to a snob, thank you very much. Anyway, I can’t read a single word of anything else until I finish Crime and Punishment.

Since it wants to be classy, Bloodline comes hyped as a thriller rather than a horror film, but there’s not a single thrill to be had regardless of genre classification. Hepburn plays Elizabeth Roffe, a pharmaceutical heiress who becomes the next in line for murder after her father’s murdered in the film’s opening scene. Like her father before her, Ms. Roffe doesn’t want her company’s stock to go public and this creates incredible friction with her three cousins who mostly provide the rich and shameful portion of the program. All roads lead to the obligatory denouement, and I should have taken a detour.

In fact, I did just that because at regular intervals during Bloodline, I kept distracting myself with other movies. For example, almost every time I saw Gert Frobe’s Inspector Hornung, I desperately wanted him to say (just once), “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” Instead, Hornung spends most his screen time discussing the case with a talking computer. Ben Gazzara seems like he’s under sedation throughout Bloodline and I could not believe this was the same actor who gave us such lusty characters in Anatomy of a Murder and Road House. Meanwhile, I still occasionally debate within myself which one’s worse between Bloodline and Oh Heavenly Dog, both turkey bombs featuring Omar Sharif. Yes, I don’t hate myself.