We've been celebrating 100 years of director Robert Wise all week by looking at some of his lesser known efforts. Previously: Tim on "Curse of the Cat People", Nathaniel on "Somebody Up There...", David on "I Want To Live!", and Manuel on "Star!" -- now here's Jason wrapping it up with "Audrey Rose"
It says a lot about the breadth of Robert Wise's filmography that the team of writers that tackled his Centennial this week here at The Film Experience have had such a gigantic stage to play upon. I mean here I am an avowed musical-agnostic taking on the director of two of the biggest movie musicals of all time, and even with the tossing aside The Sound of Music and West Side Story (although strangely I did write that movie up at TFE back in the day) I had multiple films which I could've tackled with glee. His early pair with producer Val Lewton, Curse of the Cat People (which Tim beautifully wrote up) and The Body Snatcher, are amongst the finest horror films of the 1940s; The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the most memorable expressions of the 50s sci-fi landscape; and well 1963's The Haunting is probably in my top five horror movies of ever -- to watch sad Nell lose herself amongst the shadows of Hill House is to feel your own edges fading away, bit by bit.
But my confidence in Wise convinced me that tackling an unknown was the way to go - had I really never seen 1977's Audrey Rose? I really hadn't. [more...]
Oft referenced as a rip-off of The Exorcist (Wise clearly had other things on his mind but I don't doubt the people financing it were pushing that angle), coming just a couple years after that film blew up the movies (you may recall that last year at Halloween we judged the best horror movies pre- and post-The Exorcist, so scarring was its reception), I actually see Wise's film as more akin to 1973's other horror masterpiece, Nicolas Roeg'sDon't Look Now - both tell the story of parents and an inconsolable grief up from the depths permeating their lives, upending their world.
Not to mention that you're kind of pushing it calling either Don't Look Now or Audrey Rose horror films, at least in the strictest sense of the genre. Oh sure there are crazy dwarfs and (semi) possessed girls flopping around, but their hearts both lay in the old-fashioned melodrama of a man and his wife being torn asunder by outside forces. Audrey Rose gives us Janice and Bill Templeton, played by John Beck and Marsha Mason. (Mason's Oscar-nominated performance in The Goodbye Girl was still six months from release when this came out in April of '77.) And unlike the mourning parents played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don't Look Now, the Templetons are a happy family with wide-eyed daughter Ivy intact when Audrey Rose starts off... or are they?
Wise knew how to cast a dark languor over the entire proceedings from the get-go - whereas Don't Look Now drowns a little girl in its opening scene and spends the rest of the movie suffocating beneath rain and waves, Audrey Rose gives us a car crash and a little girl trapped in in fire behind glass, an image which the film will return to time and again, and again... and again...
Does my tone betray an exhaustion? Good it should - I won't be adding Audrey Rose to my personal pantheon up alongside Wise's previous horror-tinged works any time soon, much less anywhere near Don't Look Now. While I doubt he intended it as such there are pieces of Audrey Rose that play almost as a parody of The Exorcist - Ivy's wide-eyed innocence is so cartoonish as to make us wonder if she might be a little bit, uh, simple, for one. And as with the fatherless Regan McNeil, John Beck never really registers as more than a mustache.
So into that parental vacuum steps Father Merrin for one, and Anthony Hopkins with his tales of restless layered souls for the other. Thing is Wise never really convinces me he buys the core concept of his film - reincarnation is something viewed from afar, as if through glass (many many panes of glass). Which, well, I don't buy reincarnation either, but neither do I demonic possession and The Exorcist made me believe I was actually watching a little girl's skin being written on from the inside out. All that Audrey Rose made me believe was how crappy it would be to own the apartment next door to the Templetons, what with the constantly shrieking little girl in the middle of the night, pounding on her windows. It's a New York real estate nightmare!
The film is ultimately so downbeat, and blessedly so, that you can feel Wise straining against the limitations his own story's putting on him. Is reincarnation a blessing, a curse? No, the movie doesn't seem to know, but you can tell Wise wants to drag in an out-of-nowhere dip into Crazy Town like the final scenes of Roeg's film. And so we find ourselves plunged into some strange netherworld of room inside glass room inside mirrored room as we watch two girls cut through time to become one. But the fundamental betrayal of innocence and love that's so important to sticking the landing with this sort of story never registers, because reincarnation itself is just a big question mark the film never figures out its angle on. Is this even tragedy, or am I just supposed to be hypnotized by Marsha Mason's split-ends? The secrets are in her hair, maybe?
