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.

Salem's Lot

Salem's Lot (1979) is from a novel by Stephen King, adapted for television by Paul Monash and directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). I already reviewed it a couple years ago, but after watching it again last night I want to revisit it. It's probably the most memorable adaptation of a Stephen King novel with the exceptions of Carrie and The Shining. However, it's more interesting than The Shining and more restrained than Carrie.  

Salem's Lot, because it was shot for television, is limited by the constraints of cable. There's no gore and really no violence, which makes the job of the writer and director significantly more difficult in terms of amping up the horror. They were forced to build the atmosphere in a way that would give us the creeps. If you look at Hooper's directorial debut, Texas Chain Saw, you'll see an altogether different movie. Chain Saw is frenetic, unrelenting and grueling. In terms of plot, it's an episode of Scooby Doo, except the villain is a maniac with a chainsaw, not a local farmer trying to cover up his counterfeiting racket in the basement. Meanwhile, Paul Monash wrote the screenplay for Carrie, a movie that seems stylistically as diametrically opposed to Salem's Lot as you could get. My question is: how did two people whose previous work was so hyperbolic and garish manage to come up with this slow-paced, straight-forward vampires-in-New-England chiller?

You do start to miss the violence, because Salem's Lot might be a banal sitcom about small-town America if not for the vampire element. It's rather tame, but intermittently Hooper and cinematographer Jules Brenner have constructed some of the best vampire movie set-pieces ever. The King vampire, Barlow, is a direct nod to Count Orlock in Murnau's silent-era classic Nosferatu (1922). Barlow was quite different in the novel, but the change lends a sense of unspeakable horror and dread to the adaptation. Salem's Lot's banality is only ever at the surface: beneath it, there is the dreadful sense of doom that we felt in Carrie and Texas Chain Saw. The work of Monash and Hooper is very much a part of the subtext. Very little is overt. Hooper seems to be imitating Hitchcock more than ever. He did it a little bit in Chain Saw, when one of the kids unsuspectingly walks into the layer of Leatherface and meets an unexpectedly quick demise. We knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know when because there was no immediate warning.


Salem's Lot is chock full of warnings--musical cues, telegraphed shots that tell us, "someone's about to get it." And yet, there are still shudders. When we finally see Barlow's ghastly purple face with his beady, piercing eyes and yellow fangs, it's truly horrifying: one of the most nightmarish images I can recall in movies. There's no denying the film's power, and I think in the case of Salem's Lot the fun and the excitement lie in the hours of restraint that give way to the minutes, even seconds, of chilling horror that pop up unexpectedly, more and more as the film progresses. Perhaps this is simply the psychological explanation for why we like horror movies in general.


The cast is fairly convincing: David Soul plays Ben Mears, a writer who grew up in Salem's Lot and has returned to write a book about the Marston house, an iconic den of evil now presided over by the vampire and his human guardian; James Mason plays that guardian, and he utters every line with delightfully cryptic arrogance; Lance Kerwin plays Mark, Ben's teenage muse by proxy: he's into writing (as well as monsters and horror make-up). He and Ben develop a predictable but unlikely kinship (unlikely because their characters have almost no interaction until the end); Bonnie Bedelia plays the love interest, Susan, a character from the Old School of Wimpy Horror Movie Heroines, except she poses as a "partially-liberated feminist." In fact, Susan's character is mostly reactionary. She tows the line. Thankfully, Bedelia plays the part with an understated, intelligent grace. She lets the subtlety of her performance do the work, rather than jamming the meaning of her lines and her motivations into the "foreground" of her performance. Indeed, Susan would have been as bad as she was written if played by a lesser actress.


With Lew Ayres, Ed Flanders, Fred Willard, Geoffrey Lewis, Reggie Nalder (as Barlow), and George Dzundza, as a fat, drunk New England truck driver (a combination you would never want in a human being if you can help it).


Followed by the dismal A Return to Salem's Lot and a 2004 remake (also made for TV).