(“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” airs tonight, 6/12/17 at 8:00 EST on TCM as part of their month-long salute to Audrey Hepburn.)
“You mustn’t give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get, until they’re strong enough to run into the woods or fly into a tree. And then to a higher tree and then to the sky” – Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S.
From it’s hauntingly romantic theme “Moon River” to it’s sophisticated screenplay by George Axelrod, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S is a near-perfect movie. The bittersweet comedy-drama stars Audrey Hepburn in an Oscar nominated performance as Holly Golightly, a New York “party girl” who winds up falling for struggling writer George Peppard. That Hepburn didn’t get the Oscar (Sophia Loren took it home that year for TWO WOMEN) is one of the Academy’s greatest crimes. The film has a very personal connection with…
For my third Back to School review, I watched the 1966 satire, Lord Love A Duck!
Hey hey hey!
I have to admit that, because I’m writing this review in a hurry and because the D and the F key are located right next to each other, I keep accidentally calling this film Lord Love A Fuck. Somehow, that seems appropriate because Lord Love A Duck is a very odd and subversive little movie that deals with people who are largely motivated by lust and I’m pretty sure that, at one point, Roddy McDowall is seen saying, “Fuck off!” but, of course, we don’t actually hear him say it. But seriously, Lord Love A Duck is a weird movie.
Hey hey hey!
Roddy McDowall plays Alan Musgrave, a student at a “progressive” high school in California. Roddy was about 37 years old when he played a high school senior and he doesn’t look like a teenager at all but somehow, it’s appropriate. After all, Alan is no ordinary teenager! He’s smarter than everyone else. He’s wittier than everyone else. He’s more clever than everyone else. He’s also totally obsessive and willing to do just about anything to get what he wants. And you can be sure of one thing: whenever Alan does something borderline insane, you’ll hear a group of singers harmonizing, “Hey hey hey!” in the background.
Hey hey hey!
See, it’s happening already. It doesn’t matter what Alan’s doing. He could be kicking a skateboard in the way of a romantic rival. He could be interrupting the graduation ceremony with a tractor. He could be going to prison for life. No matter what it is, it will always be accompanied by:
Hey hey hey!
Anyway, Alan is in love with the innocent, sweet, and constantly flirtatious Barbara Anne Greene (Tuesday Weld). In fact, almost everyone in the film is in love with (or, at the very least, turned on by) Barbara. The only person who doesn’t seem to be in love with Barbara is her mother (Lola Albright), a former-beauty-turned-cocktail-waitress whose world-weary cynicism seems to offer a depressing hint of what’s in store for Barbara once she gets older.
Hey hey hey!
But everyone else loves Barbara. Especially Alan! In fact, Alan is so in love with her that he swears that he’s going to make sure that she gets everything that she wants. When she needs 12 cashmere sweaters so that she can join an exclusive girl’s club, Alan helps her to convince her father (Max Showalter) to pay for them. When Barbara needs a job after dropping out of school, Alan helps her get one as a secretary for the high school’s progressive principal (Harvey Korman). When Barbara decides she wants to marry the boring but respectable Christian youth leader, Bob (Martin West), Alan keeps Bob’s mother (Ruth Gordon) so drunk that she doesn’t get a chance to reprimand her son for falling in love with a girl from a divorced family. (As Bob’s mother explains it, she doesn’t believe in divorce. “We don’t leave our husbands. We bury them.”) Eventually, a movie producer decides that he wants Barbara to star in his beach films but Bob says no. No wife of his is going to be a movie star! So, of course, Alan decides to murder Bob so that Barbara can again have what she wants…
Hey hey hey!
Lord Love A Duck is a manic comedy that satirizes everything that mainstream audiences in 1966 would have held sacred. Teenagers, conservatives, liberals, love, hate, murder, justice, marriage, divorce, morality, sex, religion, television, movies — it’s all thoroughly ridiculed in this film. (It’s not surprising that the film’s director also wrote the script for The Manchurian Candidate, a satire disguised as a thriller.) To be honest, it’s probably a little bit too manic for its own good. At times, the film run the risk of becoming exhausting. But then there’s even more times when the film is absolutely brilliant.
Hey hey hey!
Speaking of absolutely brilliant, Lord Love A Duck makes brilliant use of Roddy McDowall’s eccentric screen presence but, even better, it features one of Tuesday Weld’s best performances. Weld was a talented actress whose performances often revealed that a fragile soul is often the price that is payed for great beauty. (There’s no greater insecurity than wondering whether people are responding to who you are or to how you look. Would you still care if I was ugly is not a question we’re supposed to ask but it’s one that we’ve all wondered.) It would have been far too easy to make Barbara either totally innocent or totally manipulative. Wisely, the film does neither. Barbara may occasionally be manipulative but she always means well. It’s not her fault that everyone around her is either idiotic or insane.
Hey hey hey!
Though Lord Love A Duck is obviously a time capsule of the culture of mid-60s, it’s also a film that remains relevant even today. Culturally, we’re still obsessed with fame, youth, and beauty. In many ways, the satire of Lord Love A Duck still feels more extreme that anything that any contemporary filmmaker would dare to attempt. I can only imagine what audiences in 1966 thought as they watched this subversive teen film.
Through the Shattered Lens 