The new restoration of 'Multiple Maniacs' offers yet another insane vision from the mind of John Waters.

This week, Jacksonville’s Sun-Ray Cinema is screening a restored print of John Waters’ 1970 anti-establishment film Multiple Maniacs. Waters, who’s somehow become a household name, of sorts, despite—or perhaps because of—his eccentricities, is best known to mainstream audiences as the director of Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990) and Serial Mom (1994) (all of which I’ve reviewed on this blog). Multiple Maniacs is his ode to the Manson family, so-to-speak, a movie that’s tickled with its own transgressiveness. Waters was so fascinated and disturbed by the murders of Sharon Tate and six others (in August 1969) at the hands of the infamous Manson cult, that he attended the trials of guru Charlie (aka Jesus Christ) and his followers, including the three girls who are forever burned in our memories with their shaved heads and the crude crosses engraved on their foreheads: Susan Atkins, Lesley Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel. The film suggests that they've got the wrong people, as Divine later hints that her boyfriend is responsible for the crimes, and even holds up an actual newspaper that reads “Arrest Weirdo in Tate Murders,” just to scare him. (In reality, Waters has become a friend of Lesley Van Houten, who was recently recommended for release by the California Parole Board, only to be turned down by Governor Jerry Brown. You can read about their long correspondence and friendship, and Waters’ convincing argument for why Lesley should be released from prison, in his book Role Models.)

Multiple Maniacs follows The Lady Divine (played by Divine), a woman who dreams of having real success in the performing arts even as she “headlines” off-the-wall free shows featuring “homosexuals, druggies, and freaks.” The M.C. (David Lochary), who's also her (frustrated) boyfriend and manager-of-sorts, stands outside a white tent, shaming passers-by until they break down and enter this traveling carnival of sickos, where they can see horrible things. (You can see the mixture of disgust, fascination, and curiosity in every last one of these ordinary onlookers, even as they snicker and make fun of the freaks on display to them.) Once this troupe of exhibitionist weirdos has accumulated enough audience members, they tie up the terrified crowd with rope and steal their money and jewelry. (Not before concession girls pass out hamburgers for a buck each.)

But there's also a pretty alarming erotic scene in a Catholic Church, where Divine is propositioned by a woman (Mink Stole) who fines confession good for the soul, but not just the soul. If you never got why The Passion of the Christ was ultimately about sado-masochism, Waters will happily offer Multiple Maniacs as another visual aid. 

But even as John Waters venerates bad taste, and exhibits mockery of traditions, he cannot resist reminding us of his considerably wide appreciation of the arts. The makeshift sets (houses of family and friends in Waters' Baltimore hometown) display various movie posters (many of them art house fare from the likes of Ingmar Bergman). John Waters is a man who appreciates the ways that bad taste subverts good taste, even though he's secretly a snob himself. (Well, he's more upfront about it these days, if you pay any attention to his books and interviews.) Waters reads literary fiction voraciously, doesn’t own a television set (or at least, doesn’t watch any TV), and boasts an extensive art collection. You see, John Waters has always maintained a healthy love for the whole spectrum of art and trash, which is why he was born in exactly the right time and place. Multiple Maniacs, a movie that jokingly glamorizes the dregs of society, drags the respectable and the conventional people of the world, kicking and screaming, into its lair and confronts them with what they cannot accept on their own: their own banality, perhaps, or maybe the fact that their form of culture isn’t any more valid than what they consider garbage. 

Multiple Maniacs isn’t likely to be everyone’s cup of tea. At 82 minutes, the movie somehow feels too long, because Waters, when he was making his early films, didn’t always know when to cut a scene. The movie has static moments, but it’s a sight to behold all the same. Divine was always a devoted star, even when his performances registered as mostly amateur work. (He got better and better though, and in Multiple Maniacs his Elizabeth Taylor-vamping occasionally turns surreal.) 

What’s most exciting about Multiple Maniacs, besides the fact that it was the penultimate step toward Waters’ crowning filth-de-resistance, 1972’s Pink Flamingos, is that this movie provides a window into the insanity of the 1960s. All that sizzling, lunatic rage against society has been captured for those of us who can only experience the 1960s by proxy. If the Manson murders drove a dagger into the heart of the Peace and Love movement, Multiple Maniacs was there to record the fall: John Waters has always been able to tap directly into the bloodstream of the here and now: He knows what’s going on in the world, and he filters it through his own deliriously happy vision. The anger and the humor and the irreverence have lost none of their power. Multiple Maniacs is stabby and proud of it. 

With Mary Vivian Pearce.

Lovers and Other Strangers

Lovers and Other Strangers (1970) is a surprisingly endearing comedy about a groom who gets cold feet three days before his wedding, adapted by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna from their play (with the help of David Goodman). The central characters of the film are Mike and Susan (Michael Brandon and Bonnie Bedelia). Mike wakes Susan up in the middle of the night and tells her, “Remember when I asked you to marry me and you said I could take it back if I wanted to? Well, I’m taking it back.” He rants and rants about why they shouldn’t get married, and Susan listens coolly until he’s finished; then she softly reminds him to pick up his tuxedo in the morning while she straddles her fingers peacefully along his back. I love that reaction. Susan doesn’t have a meltdown, screaming “Don’t you love me anymore?” But she’s also not letting Mike off the hook. She simply understands that he’s nervous and that he may very well change his mind again.

The whole movie is a kind of examination of the clash between modern and traditional values and the way married people mythologize marriage, often because they’re so unhappy. When Mike’s parents (played brilliantly by John Castelana and Bea Arthur) offer up countless examples of married couples who are horrible to each other and miserable, they proudly assert that all of those couples are still together. Divorce, it seems, is unthinkable, and total misery is better than ending a marriage.

What strikes me about Lovers and Other Strangers is its comic ease and its well-drawn characters. This is a film very much of its time and absolutely immersed in the sexual politics of the 1960s, but it never feels militant or preachy because the characters are so well-drawn and the conversations they have feel authentic and complex. When Anne Meara, playing Susan’s sister, has to work to get some sexual attention from her husband (Harry Guardino), her needs spark a big fight about their own roles in their marriage. Meara is sexy and intelligent even as she lets her husband think he’s winning the argument, because basically he’s a big child who needs to feel that he’s in control and that his wife submits to him. Meara deftly walks through this minefield, and we marvel at her comic timing and the ways in which she alternately reacts to her husband and manages him.

Mike and Susan’s marriage is also not the central focus of the film. It’s really about the ways various people in their circle grapple with the choices they’ve made and with the urges and impulse they have. One of the funniest threads of the movie involves Mike’s friend Jerry (Robert Dishy) repeatedly trying to score with Susan’s flaky but smart cousin Brenda (Marian Hailey). Jerry hesitantly agrees to take Brenda out. (He only wants a sure thing.) Brenda, who’s shy but has deep reserves of emotion and devotion if only she can find the right guy, keeps quoting the hip books she’s read (like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex), and Jerry presumably takes a lot of cold showers.

Robert Castellano and Bea Arthur play Mike’s parents, the most miserable couple in the film. And yet, there’s tenderness between them, a tenderness perhaps born of familiarity. Lovers and Other Strangers taps into the mystery of marriage. It also reminds us that one of the worst things we can do is put expectations on other people who are getting married. They have to create their own marriage, and saddling them with demands is really quite selfish. (Mike’s brother, Richie, is taking a lot of heat from Mom and Dad for breaking up with his wife, played by Diane Keaton in her first movie role.) And in the end, it appears that Mike and Susan are best suited for marriage because they walk through life with a sense of humor and a healthy lack of expectation. This is a movie that I really loved, full of spark and insight and surprisingly not dated.

With Cloris Leachman, Gig Young, Joseph Hindy and Anne Jackson. Directed by Cy Howard.

The Conformist

(Il conformista). Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) is about a man who swallows the Fascist pill with everything in him because he desperately wants to be part of the group. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Marcello Clerici, a man whose primary motivation is to "construct" his own normalcy (heterosexual, Christian, Fascist). The story takes place in Italy and France in the 1930s, during which time Marcello becomes a member of Mussolini's secret police. When his next assignment is to assassinate one of his former professors, who's anti-Fascist, Marcello must face the tension threatening to destroy him: can he sacrifice his loyalty to his ideals for his loyalty to the State?

Bertolucci captures the essence of how the pursuit of acceptance drives people, even brainwashes them. It's a hierarchical tool that becomes internalized: Marcello remakes himself--he tries to embody the qualities, the values, and the emotions required of him--in the hope that he will be accepted. It's the same form of control utilized in every school over the last centuries: a sort of institutionalized self-rehabilitation.

This was my first Bertolucci film, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, despite its general weirdness. It's one of those rare movies that visually thrills you, even when you're scratching your head at some of the logic--or lack thereof--of the plot. The characters do things that often make little sense at the time, and Bertolucci plays with chronology a bit. His movie works like a Modernist novel: it's impressionistic, and it zooms in on the details of a given scene. The entirety of the plot doesn't hinge on one major, climactic event the way many American films do. (This is not to say that either method is superior to the other, but it may be one of the reasons Americans have a hard time with European films and vice versa. We want everything laid out in clearly chronological order, and dammit, it had better all make sense.) The major "event" of the film, which would probably have come sooner in an American movie, and probably would have been one of several like it, is delayed into perpetuity, to the point that you wonder if you'll have the pleasure of the payoff at all. And even when it comes it's stretched out, but with a surprising level of facility. Bertolucci manages to create a really thrilling suspense sequence that takes place in the woodsy mountains on a lonely stretch of road). He's built it up so much that you're tense from the excitement.

The mood of The Conformist is what lingers with you after the movie's over. It's ominous and stark but also fluid. The camera continually finds innovative ways into each scene. At times it has a naive playfulness to it, usually when Marcello's wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) is onscreen. She's silly, playful, and superficial, relatively oblivious to her husband's dark vocation. And Trintignant handles his character's emotional deadness well--he's not boring but he's appropriately subdued, always aware of the gravity of his ambitions and the tasks at hand.

With Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio (as the professor), Dominique Sanda (as the professor's sexually ambiguous wife), Fosco Giachetti, Jose Quaglio, Yvonne Sanson, and Pierre Clementi. The screenplay was adapted by the director from Alberto Moravia's novel of the same name. The lovely, lilting score was composed by Georges Delerue. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. 111 minutes.