There are a couple of minute subplots in the movie, one involving the romance between Doug and Janet, and the other one involving Katie’s influence on her kid sister, Bonnie (Laura Mooney). But the heart of this movie is the father’s unsuccessful attempts to enforce curfews, dictate behavior, and curtail the emotional development of his daughter.
The scene that sets up this obsession is a sick one—the sicker the more you think about it. Doug takes the family to the beach, and then stares in horrified fascination as Katie comes running out of the surf in her one-piece bathing suit, her breasts bouncing in slow motion like outtakes from a TV jiggle show.
The problem with this scene is that Doug seems to regard his daughter not in parental terms but in sexual ones. The movie does not possess a shred of healthy insight into the process by which people mature; it sees adolescent girls as commodities to be protected from predatory males.
The French director Jean-Luc Godard once said that the way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. By a happy coincidence, just such a movie opened on the same day as She’s Out of Control. It’s called Say Anything, and it is healthy, sensitive, and true about a relationship between a father, his daughter, and her boyfriend. It is a movie about personal standards, about learning to trust, about growing up healthy and sane. The people who made She’s Out of Control could learn a lot from it.
Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline
(Directed by Terence Young; starring Audrey Hepburn; 1979)
After six months, a week, and two days of suspense, we can now relax: The worst movie of 1979 has opened. Just avoid this one film, and anything else you see will be better. The name of the movie is Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, and on second thought, I’m not recommending that you avoid it: See Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, and weep for the cinema.
The movie is based on a novel by Sidney Sheldon, a fact cunningly hinted in its title. It is about a woman who gains control of her father’s multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company after her father dies in a fishy mountain-climbing accident. The woman is played by Audrey Hepburn, making her first screen appearance in four years, and there is this much to be said: When she appears on the screen for the first time, the theater goes silent as everyone absorbs once again the fact of her extraordinary beauty. And then the theater stays silent, as everyone absorbs the astonishing extent of the artistic stupidity wreaked upon her by the screenplay.
I’ve jotted down a few sample lines. “When I yam feenished weev you,” threatens one character, “you vell be lak ze beetle I haf killed: Almost dead!”
At another point, Hepburn learns that a chemist working for her late father’s firm has made an interesting pharmaceutical discovery that may turn out to be marketable: A drug promising eternal youth.
“Normal people will be able to live 100 or 150 years,” he avers.
“How soon can this drug be marketed?” she asks.
“Eighteen months.”
“Make it twelve. This is urgent.”
Faithful moviegoers may recall that Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight was released two summers ago, and that I was unkind enough to give it a reserved review. I now apologize for that error. The Other Side of Midnight was so immeasurably better than Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline that, in retrospect, Sheldon should have sued to have his name taken out of the title of this film and put in the other one. But why should he worry? The novel was sold for a reported $2 million, and Sheldon is laughing all the way to the remedial writing class.
The film’s cast is, of course, horribly mistreated. Ben Gazzara is perhaps the worst victim. He plays Hepburn’s confidant and lover. The fact that Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline and Gazzara’s Saint Jack are playing at the same time in the same town offers mute evidence that a good actor in a bad movie should not necessarily be blamed for everything.
Other people we cannot blame for being in this movie include Irene Papas, arguably the most striking actress in the movies; James Mason, as civilized as ever; Romy Schneider, she of the cool elegance; and Gert Frobe, of the police department. Omar Sharif is not only blameless, he is even praiseworthy: As he plays his scenes, he finds a way to sneak past the director his obvious conviction that the dialogue he has been given is beneath contempt and may, indeed, be hilarious.
I have not yet mentioned why the movie is considered marketable. It is about the favorite fictional subject of the fast-fading seventies: the Woman in Danger. Hepburn is not only made to crawl along burning rooftops and be assaulted by industrial spies, but, such trash is this film, at one point she is almost run down by a truck that isn’t even intended to hit her. In a movie built upon threats on a character’s life, it is a little reprehensible to suggest that she could die in a random accident. But then, this film is a little reprehensible.
Silent Fall
(Directed by Bruce Beresford; starring Richard Dreyfuss, Liv Tyler; 1994)
Silent Fall is a thriller about an autistic little boy who witnesses the murder of his parents. He’d make a great witness, if only he would talk. I was reminded of a T.V. report about a parrot that witnessed a murder. The parrot talked, but was it admissible as a witness?
Psychiatrist Jack Reiner (Richard Dreyfuss), uses a deck of cards while explaining the boy to his older sister, Sylvia (Liv Tyler). Let’s say the solution to the murder is the Queen. You or I might be reminded of it by a million things. But Tim can only get to the Queen from the Jack. And he can only get to the Jack from the 10. And so on, all the way back to the Ace—which is, in a sense, what the psychiatrist is searching for.
Silent Fall approaches this story in a solemn way, in one of those productions where everybody lives in big houses surrounded by autumnal woods, and spends a lot of time walking by the sides of lakes. The Dreyfuss character has retired from treating children after a child died while under his care. Now he’s hauled out of retirement by the local sheriff (J. T. Walsh, playing a nice guy for a change). The parents of Sylvia and Tim have been found brutally slashed to death in their bedroom. When the cops arrive, Tim is swinging a bloody knife and Sylvia is cowering in the closet. She saw the killer, a man who escaped before she could ID him.
The cops use pretty sloppy procedure on the case. Sylvia and Tim are allowed to go back to the house to live while it is still a crime scene. Apart from the possibility they might disturb clues, nobody in the movie even thinks it might be dangerous for an eighteen-year-old girl to be out there unprotected, with a mad slasher on the loose and she as the only witness. Meanwhile, Reiner goes to work making friends with Tim, hoping he holds the clue to the murders.
There is more. Much more. Some of it involves Linda Hamilton (Terminator II), as Jake’s wife, Karen. She gets second billing but the role is just a hair this side of unnecessary. John Lithgow wanders through in a thankless role as a psychiatrist who believes in using drugs instead of therapy. Mostly the action involves Jake and the little boy, and Jake and the sexy teenage girl, who seems sorta attracted to him.
Now. There are some things about this plot I dare not reveal. Let’s go carefully here. There is an attempted murder, and in terms of its planning, execution, sheer impossibility, and ultimate outcome, it is without doubt the most absurd attempted murder I have seen since Goldie Hawn got involved with that elevator in Deceived (1991).