She was nuts.
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Yes. Bottom line. Whether schizophrenic or bi-polar(manic depressive) or whatever...not good. She's a dry run for the thriller villainesses in Play Misty for Me and Fatal Attraction, but without murderous intent.
And its not misogynistic to say so. Movies about MALE stalkers of females are even scarier.
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The cold hearted dad in the opening credits was supposed to promote pity for her "disorder" but failed to do so because we are not given the full story here. Just implication by his cold farewell.
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Yes...though we do learn things about him as the movie goes on that SOUND right ...widowed, remarried, cold, distant, a drinker...who cruelly chastized Pookie for trying to rekindle memories of her late mother. I mean, it wasn't as if Pookie didn't have REASON for her madness. But dealing with that is another story...
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Todays audience would indeed expect this to evolve into a horror story. A furtherence of this relationship would certainly have done just that.
Play Misty for Me. Fatal Attraction.
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But Jerry wisely comes to his senses and backs off.
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Wendell Burton was good casting...he was rather unformed and childlike and shy (Roger Ebert called Jerry kind of stupid, which isn't quite fair but he is passive.)
I think a lot of us have been there, at some level. Whether someone likes US too much, or we like THEM to much, a balance has to be found, a normal relationship has to be pursued. If not, somebody has to have the strength to say "goodbye."
That said, I think we've all known some couples, married even, where one of them IS nuts, just not murderous. The other one passively gives in and ends up married to a nutter, but lives with it. I've KNOWN them.
CONT
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ecarle (14979)
a year ago
My favorite character was Tim McGuire's.
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He was an interesting actor with a brief career and a tragic end.
Importantly he was the son of actor John McIntire and Jeanette Nolan. McIntire had a craggy face -- made for Westerns like Wagon Train -- but he also played a cop on The Naked City and a modern-day small town sheriff for Hitchcock in Psycho. Jeanette Nolan had attractive features but usually played mother types -- though in the 50's in The Big Heat, she's a fairly sexy gangster's widow.
Anyway, Tim McIntire got some of his dad's expressive features(handsome) and some of his mother's good looks, and had charisma to burn...but he never got too far in movies. I recall him playing the "comedy bully" cop Roscoe Rules in the movie of "The Choirboys." That may have been his biggest movie part.
But in The Sterile Cuckoo, Tim McIntire got third billing, above the title, with Minnelli and Burton. He earned it. He held his keep in the tiny universe of the story.
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He had more of a story behind him than Jerry did, being a big handsome, phony braggard of a bear who, in reality, can't get laid.
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And Pookie kept accusing him of being gay -- which is also a crazy woman's way of trying to separate her boyfriend from HIS best "guy friend."
McIntire had the most charisma of the three leads, and was kept mysterious and grumpy -- gay? (Not really proved -- just vengeful Pookie talk.) Never been laid?(Hard to believe...did he finally confess to that?) In some ways, the voice of normalcy in the story and maybe, just a little, trying to influence Jerry to leave Pookie. Good part, good actor. Died young. Drugs.
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CONT
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ecarle (14979)
a year ago
It is a great visual image of late 60's, smalltime college life.
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Yes, the movie makes that life look very inviting. Just not with Pookie Adams.
Though hey, the scenes of first love and first sex being had in a cold, banal motel room...one could feel both the potential loving relationship AND the exciting carnality of such matters, for both Pookie and Jerry. There was hope in those scenes, lonely as they were. Pookie COULD have been a good companion at those colleges, if only ...she had help.
(Her last scene is just plain depressing.)
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I was very young at the time and remember glimpses of these fashions and muted colors soon to go full blown in psychadelia.
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Yes..rather like The Graduate, the movie seemed just a bit "behind the times" and not predictive of where college life and youth were going.
PS. Liza's Oscar nomination came largely, it was written, on the basis of her long one take telephone scene in which she begs Jerry to take her back (and he does.) 4 years later, Barbra Streisand would pretty much do the same scene to beg Robert Redford to take HER back(and he does) in The Way We Were. Babs got an Oscar nom, too. I'm amazed we weren't FLOODED with scenes of women on the phone begging their men to take them back!
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