Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner) is an ordinary young man anxious to step out into the "adult world". His plan is to move out of his parents' Long Island house into an eight-floor Greenwich Village walk-up - and to try and convince someone to share his new "liberated lifestyle". This was Francis Ford Coppola's UCLA Film School master's thesis - and a hilarious, high-speed debut in film comedy for the future director of THE GODFATHER and APOCALPSE NOW. Fresh off A PATCH OF BLUE Elizabeth Hartman suitably plays the kooky spiteful actress who toys with Bernard. Karen Black makes her debut as the nice girl Bernard overlooks and Geraldine Page nearly steals the show with her Academy Award-nominated performance as Bernard's possessive mother.
Go-go dancer and actress Barbara Darling (Elizabeth Hartman) |
The cast here is the thing: Elizabeth Hartman as the man-hating actress and go-go dancer Barbara Darling who gets our hapless hero in her thrall. We see flashbacks to her youth, laughing at horror flicks like THE PIT AND THE PENDELUM ... Kastner is just right as Benjamin, with Tony Bill as his colleague at the New York Central Library (we were back there recently with THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW), where Bernard's father is curator of the secret pornography section which Miss Thing stumbles into.... did I not mention Miss Thing? - she is Bernard's landlady and is the great Julie Harris and she is wonderful here ... there is the rooster guarding the corridor and who attacks girls; and then we have the equally wonderful Geraldine Page (above) as Bernard's mother, with Rip Torn as his father. This was based on a popular book by David Benedictus which I remember reading at the time. It reminds me a lot too of that zany free-wheeling HAROLD AND MAUDE.
Miss Harris as Miss Thing - see Harris label for her very nice note to me in 1977 |
I have just seen on IMDB: Peter Kastner 1943-2008, aged 64, he was also in another interesting '60s one: NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE, a Canadian indie in 1964.
No comments:
Post a Comment