31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (19) Donald Sutherland in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (WITH A GUEST CONTRIBUTION FROM JOHN LEVY)

"There can't be a conspiracy..."

Wanna hear one of the most insane but true statements in film history?  Donald Sutherland has never been nominated for an Oscar.  Now let me state that again for anyone who thinks they might have misread that sentence...Donald Sutherland has never been nominated for an Oscar.  I can't think of many more oversights in the history of The Academy Awards more shameful than the fact that they have overlooked year after year after year one of our most intelligent and valuable actors.  Sutherland shouldn't even be a candidate for this list (with one of the main rules being no Oscar nominees) but facts are facts and the man who has turned in some of the great performances in screen history has really never been given the due he has so deserved.  

Frankly, there are dozens of Donald Sutherland performances I could have gone with for this list so I just went with my gut and chose my favorite...that of doomed Matthew Bennell in Philip Kaufman's stunning 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of my all-time favorite films.  I have written on the film before so I will leave most of the time to my contributor today, but I will just ask that you go back and watch this film again and pay particular attention to Donald Sutherland's performance.  He slips into Bennell completely and projects the character's initial disbelief, questioning and finally terrifying acceptance with astonishing capability.  Most actors might have looked upon a role in a science fiction horror remake as just an excuse to pick up a check, but Sutherland plays this role with all the conviction and power he could muster.  His work makes what would already be a major film into something even more mesmerizing and powerful.  

I am very pleased tonight to offer up a guest contribution on Donald Sutherland from my friend, the award-winning filmmaker John Levy.  I first fell under the spell of John's incredible short-films a couple of years back and he has become one of my best online friends, and I am always amazed by how close our tastes always seem to match up.  After reading John's terrific contribution on Sutherland please visit his La Belle Aurore page where you can read about, and watch, some of his amazing work, including his truly exceptional Tabula Rasa, which just won a much-deserved audience award at the Once a Week Online Film Festival.  

John is a great friend and a great artist and I am honored that he offered up this piece on one of our shared favorite actors.  Thanks so much John!

-John Levy on Donald Sutherland, written for Moon in the Gutter (2012)-

"Donald Sutherland has one of the greatest, and possibly most overlooked, bodies of work of any actor alive today. From the mid 60’s to the early 80’s he has a section of work that rivals the most notable and celebrated actors of all time, with roles both supporting and as lead that are so many distant worlds apart and yet equally impressive. From Kelly’s Heroes to Steelyard Blues. Don’t Look Now to The Disappearance. Klute to Ordinary People. What works for him time and time again is his subtlety and naturalism. No matter how many times you’ve seen him before, he is completely believable and unpredictable. Amazing actors like Deniro and Pacino (so brilliant) always kind of have one thing working against them, which is the audience expectation of always anticipating a performance that will reach to extremes levels of intensity. But Sutherland is kind of the other way. He is so subtle in carrying himself like the subject of a documentary that when he has a moment of vulnerability, or emotional eruption, it is absolutely polarizing to the viewers mind and memory. On the surface there is no ego in his heroics. No suave in his romance. No menace in his evil. Examples that come to mind are him succumbing to Jane Fonda’s manipulative seduction in Klute. And the revelation of his villainy then tenderness, then further villainy in The Eye Of The Needle. Even in later performances like Backdraft, where he plays an arsonist, the madness of his character is all in his eyes. He jolts the viewer’s preconception of character types. But even better, he humanizes all of them just as Deniro or Pacino would. But where some actors are intricate muralists, Sutherland is an ambiguous minimalist. There is a moment in Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, far into the ongoing chase of the film, when Brooke Adams literally crumbles in Sutherland’s arms. And his reaction is seemingly so void of performance that it pushes the emotional currency of the film to another level, reminding you of the stakes, that at that point in the film, may have fallen a bit to the background. It’s the last cry and whimper for humanity. And without that, it would still be a great film, but it was dramatic gravy that made it an indelible moment. That’s all Sutherland. "

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (20) Elvis Presley in LIVE A LITTLE, LOVE A LITTLE (WITH A SPECIAL GUEST CONTRIBUTION FROM SHEILA O'MALLEY)

"Let's see if we can't double-cross the stars."

Anyone who has followed Moon in the Gutter for even a small amount of time knows how much I love and value Elvis Presley, so it's probably not a surprise that I am including his work as an actor on this list.  I do hope my choice of performance perhaps is a little surprising as I know that his roles in such dramas as King Creole (1958), Flaming Star and Wild in the Country (both 1960) might indeed be more expected.  When thinking about Elvis on the screen though, perhaps the things that mean the most to me are his warmth and humor and these two qualities were never more apparent than they were in his role as photographer Greg Nolan in Norman Taurog's fantastic chaotic comedy Live a Little, Love a Little...a film which showed Elvis could have been a modern-day Cary Grant had anyone at the time been wise enough to notice.  

Watching Elvis today in Live a Little, Love a Little will prove an eye opening experience for anyone who has long accepted the myth that this great man couldn't act and that all of his films fell under one certain formula.  Taurog's ingenious film not only breaks the 'formula', that had began to fail around 1966 and 1967 with such dreck as Paradise Hawaiian Style, but it smashes it to pieces and it offers Elvis, a wonderfully gifted comedian, the most flexible and engaging role of his career.  As Nolan, Presley is ferociously funny, incredibly natural and unbelievably sexy...it's one of the great comedic performances from the sixties and the real 'tragedy' of Elvis Presley's film career is that hardly anyone seemed to notice just how incredibly funny and charming this man was on the screen.  

The time has come for a serious reevaluation of Elvis Presley's undeniable abilities as an actor and his film career in general.  Today I am pleased to offer an amazing guest-commentary from another writer who agrees with me on this fact, the amazing Sheila O'Malley.  Some of you might remember this chat Sheila and I had regarding Elvis' film career over at her essential Sheila Variations, which I was so honored to take part in.  Sheila's writing has been a constant source of inspiration for me and I think her many articles on Elvis are absolutely essential for not only fans of the man but anyone interested in American culture in general.  I am thrilled and honored to offer up this brand new piece that Sheila has written regarding Live a Little, Love a Little and one of modern cinema's most undervalued great actors.  

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

-Sheila O'Malley on Elvis Presley in Live a Little, Love a Little-

Great American character actress Mildred Dunnock tells a story about the first days of shooting Love Me Tender (1956), which was 21-year-old Elvis Presley's film debut. He played one of Dunnock's sons. He was totally green as an actor. In one scene, Dunnock had to bark at him, "Put that gun down!" The first time they shot it, her tone of command so threw him (and he was, famously, a boy who did what his Mama told him to do) that he put the gun down, although the scene actually called for him to ignore her order and race out the door. They cut, and director Robert Webb said, "Why on earth did you put the gun down?" And Elvis said, guileless, "Well ... she told me to." This anecdote has been used to mock Elvis' ineptness as an actor, but Dunnock had another take: "For the first time in the whole thing he had heard me, and he believed me. Before, he'd just been thinking what he was doing and how he was going to do it. I think it's a funny story. I also think it's a story about a beginner who had one of the essentials of acting, which is to believe."

This is an extraordinary statement from a woman who knew what she was talking about when it came to acting. Extraordinary because Elvis' gifts as an actor have not just been dismissed, but barely acknowledged. 

One film you never hear anything about is Live a Little, Love a Little (1968), directed by Norman Taurog, a prolific director who had been around since the 1930s, and directed most of the Elvis formula pics that made Elvis and Colonel Parker so much money in the 1960s. By 1968, Elvis was nearing the end of his movie contract, and he was starting to look forward to live performing again. His movies were no longer drawing the audience they had in the early 1960s, and so Live a Little, Love a Little came and went. It is a forgotten film., and what a pity, because it is a stylish, madcap, ridiculous romp, featuring one of Elvis' funniest performances. 

In Live a Little, Love a Little, Elvis plays Greg Nolan, a photographer who finds himself in the crosshairs of a crazy dame named Bernice (or is it Alice?) (played by Michele Carey) who decides that she will have him, come hell or high water. She drugs him to keep him captive in her beach house. When he wakes up, he has been fired, and also has lost his apartment. Greg then begins a madcap race to get another job, all while trying to ditch the insistent unflappable Bernice. The mood here is reminiscent of the great screwballs of the 1930s, where poor elegant Cary Grant loses his mind trying to maintain his dignity in the face of the adorable onslaught of Irene Dunne or Katharine Hepburn.

The Elvis formula pics like Blue Hawaii, Girl Happy, It Happened at the World's Fair took place in what I call "Elvis Land", with stunning locations but no recognizable real-world issues. The only reason to see many of them is Elvis. With Live a Little, Love a Little, the formula loosens quite a bit. The psychedelic grooviness of the 1960s is allowed some room to express itself (there's a wacky dream sequence), and, startlingly, there are only a couple of songs, one being the unforgettable "A Little Less Conversation".

What makes this performance unique in Elvis' career is that he is allowed to be cranky in the face of some dame chasing after him. He plays a normal man, in other words, who happens to look like Elvis Presley. In most of his films, he is pursued by no less than three women (the Elvis formula pics loved the triangulation of Elvis), and he is open to all of them, which causes much mayhem along the way. But here, he is a solitary man, a workaholic, and he feels nothing for this broad in the bathing suit who has kidnapped him. He just wants to get away. This is a normal reaction. His crankiness is what makes the performance so funny. Watch his facial expressions in the sequence where she has shoved a thermometer in his mouth to check his temperature (she gasps when she sees the reading: "98.6!!!" Elvis barks, "Oh, come ON, that's NORMAL!"), as she babbles on to him about her life and her wacko philosophies. He is undone by this woman. What a refreshing change in Elvis' movie career, where Elvis(TM) wasn't undone by anything. He's hilarious when he feels trapped and annoyed. He runs up and down staircases, he hides behind newspapers in crowded elevators, and at one point he mutters to himself out of the corner of his mouth, a la W.C. Fields, "Ya miserable kid." In the Elvis Formula Pics that dominated in the early to mid 1960s, Elvis was rarely allowed the opportunity to play anything remotely human. He played his own image and myth, and he did that better than anyone, being, as he was, sui generis. But it's such a joy to see him tossed into a chaotic situation, involving demanding bosses, impatient clients, chilly secretaries, a ditzy-eyed dame, and a giant slobbering dog. He is harassed by them all.

It was 1968. Elvis was a new father. In the summer of that year, he had filmed a TV special for NBC which would air close to Christmastime, and is now known as his "comeback special". He was in his absolute prime. Elvis was always a good-looking man, but here he is almost otherworldly in his beauty. But it's not a vain performance. Half the time, he is in a terricloth robe, unshaven, chasing Bernice around her house, shouting up the stairs at her like a lunatic. He is forced to eat dog food at one point. Of course he is, deep down, strangely drawn to this weird woman who can't stop pursuing him, but at the same time he just wants her to leave him alone. 

What an interesting dynamic: To allow the biggest sex symbol in the world to show annoyance at being pursued by a woman. Elvis was always a good sport about the throngs of women who chased him, from his earliest days performing on the Louisiana Hayride out of Shreveport, Louisiana, where he first started making his name. His car was repeatedly demolished. His clothes were torn off. Women would dress up as maids and try to storm the barricades of the hotels where he stayed. His mother worried that the girls would kill him, but he always knew they just wanted to get close to him, it was okay, they didn't mean any harm. In Live a Little, Love a Little, Elvis is allowed to be annoyed by the fact that women pursued him with a single-mindedness bordering on mania. He is allowed to have some feelings about the fact that nobody, ever, left him alone. 

One of the things that Elvis brought to all of his roles was a sense of ease and openness before the camera. Mildred Dunnock saw it in 1956. This young man had the rare ability to believe. The camera picks up honesty and cannot abide phoniness. Elvis never lied, and Elvis was never phony. This was true in King Creole and it was true in Girls! Girls! Girls!. Elvis "showed up" with his honesty intact, regardless of the absurdity of the material. You never feel like he is slumming. This was one of his aces in the hole as a singer and performer, and it is there in his acting roles as well. In Live a Little, Love a Little, he gives a wonderful comedic and realistic performance which is essentially forgotten. 

You can't understand how good Elvis Presley was onscreen, how funny, how human, how real, if you haven't seen Live a Little, Love a Little.

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (21) Kristen Stewart in ADVENTURELAND (WITH A SPECIAL GUEST CONTRIBUTION FROM ERICH KUERSTEN)

When I first wrote about Adventureland back in the spring of 2009 I compared Kristen Stewart's remarkable performance in it to Jennifer Jason Leigh's work in Fast Times in Ridgemont High (1982).  Like Leigh, Stewart managed to capture both the fragility and exuberance of youth in a performance of startling depth and emotion, two qualities that Stewart's many critics claim that are lacking from her work...a fact that makes me think that I have been watching someone else's filmography play out in front of me.  

There probably isn't a more polarizing young American actress in cinema today than Kristen Stewart.  For those, like myself, who have followed and greatly admired her work since seeing Panic Room a decade ago we see an incredibly original and distinct young talent who has been able to slip into roles as varied as Bella Swan, Joan Jett and even Snow White.  Whether the film has called for romantic yearning, gritty realism or ferocious physicality, Stewart has been able to essay each with a sharp sense of authority and purpose.  To her many critics though, who can't seem to step away from their hatred of Twilight and the media's unbelievably sexist view of her personal life, she is a vacuum and an emotionless void without a ounce of talent...again have we been watching a different filmography play out this past decade?

While Bella Swan remains the chief role that 22 year old Kristen Stewart is known for it is Adventureland's Em Lewin than has the biggest emotional pull for me.  Perhaps because in some ways it tells my own story, I remain totally perplexed by anyone who isn't at least the slightest bit moved by Greg Mottola's heartfelt coming of age story and specifically Stewart's work as Em.  As Jesse Eisenberg's character's first true-love, Stewart is unbelievably captivating, moving and unforgettable...like the well-worn grooves of the Big Star, Replacements and Velvet Underground albums that Em keeps in her room. 

I originally wasn't going to feature any performances from the past several years on this list (which mostly covers roughly the late sixties up to the late nineties) but when I recently read Erich Kuersten's incredibly eloquent and passionate defense of Kristen Stewart (linked below) at his Acidemic I knew that I had to make an exception and include a more recent performance.  Recognizing that Erich and I shared the same admiration for Stewart, and the same perplexed attitude towards her harshest critics, I invited him to submit a  few thoughts for this series.  Erich kindly put together this incredibly spot-on and moving section from his recent piece on Stewart for Moon in the Gutter and I am very excited to present it here.  Do yourself a favor and be sure to visit Acidemic and read his original complete piece on Kristen Stewart, which is one of the most insightful, thoughtful and necessary cinema articles I have read in quite some time.  

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

Erich Kuersten on Kristen Stewart, edited for Moon in the Gutter from his incredible piece "Kristen Stewart in the Snow With Poison", which can be read here at Acidemic.

"In playing young, vulnerable, awkwardly beautiful women, Kristen Stewart draws continual fire from critics and Twilight fans alike. It's not her looks they object to, but the direction in which she herself looks outward from the screen and weighs and judges and forgives the hearts of those watching, and those who think themselves impure, beyond saving, recoil from her absolving gaze. They are expecting perhaps a girl who will wince and smooth her hair back when they leer at her, a shy dove on display. Instead she's disheveled and pale and her body is never put on display for the camera, at least not the leering way the shirtless bodies of her male co-stars are. It's the reverse of the usual dichotomy.

But that forgiving tenderness in her eyes for even the ugly toads is a rare thing, it's what Stewart shares with Marilyn Monroe. Both of them love, or at least 'feel sorry for' the creatures most of us have cast off. MM felt compassion for the Creature from the Black Lagoon in Seven Year Itch, and didn't even mind flirting with Tom Ewell if it got her some air conditioning. Hey, princesses have kissed worse frogs for far less, and that's what Stewart as Bella provides, she is the princess who sees the beauty in the beast a priori to getting to know him. She's Julia Adams choosing the creature over Richard Carlson. Our pitchfork and torch hands tremble with the instinctual desire to burn her at the stake for this transgression. When her lip trembles and her eyes cross looking up at her current love object, waiting for that slow kiss, it becomes a delirious swooning moment perfect for a Rohmer film, but in the US, this kind of liberated outward gazer--the woman daring to see instead of just being seen --is an unforgivable offense."

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (23 and 22) Vonetta McGee and Max Julien in THOMASINE AND BUSHROD

I knew I wanted to include Gordon Parks Jr's incredible Thomasine and Bushrod in this series but I couldn't decide which star of the film I wanted to highlight, Vonetta McGee or Max Julien.  Ultimately I knew I had to include both of these amazing performers as Parks' unbelievably special film would be unthinkable without either McGee or Julien.  Below are excerpts from my original look at Thomasine and Bushrod...the full piece can be read here for those interested. 

The story of Thomasine and Bushrod begins with Max Julien, a writer and actor best known for his role as the ambitious pimp Goldie in 1973’s The Mack. Author Darius James would note that Julien’s early life would be as far removed from his most famous role as possible and that he had “studied at Carnegie Hall’s Dramatic Workshop” and by his early twenties was appearing in “Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival”.

Julien’s role in The Mack would make him an overnight star but the film, like almost all of the ‘blaxploitation’ films of the period, would garner as much derision as praise. Author Donald Bogle would argue that despite its popularity The Mack exemplified the problems with the movement and “was a mess without much of a script” and that it was “gaudy and cheap”. Still, others found much to admire in the film and the genre, such as film historian James Robert Parrish who noted that Julien was one of the genre’s shining lights and was “talented and charismatic”. Despite its many virtues and its success with audiences, The Mack was looked upon as by many as a film made by whites about blacks, something that Julien wanted very much to rectify for his next project. A meeting between Julien with a young up and coming actress shortly after The Mack’s premiere would plant the seeds for what would eventually become Thomasine and Bushrod.

Vonetta Mcgee was born in San Francisco in January 1940. After graduating from San Francisco’s Polytechnic High School in 1962 she became more and more interested in acting. After traveling to Europe, she began appearing in a number of Italian productions in the late sixties before getting steady work in a number of low budget exploitation films in the early seventies upon her return to America. Shortly after their introduction Mcgee became involved romantically with Julien, who was in the process of working on his first screenplay. The script, centering on an African American female version of James Bond named Cleopatra Jones, was quickly refashioned as a vehicle for McGee. Once the script was sold however to Warner Brothers, both Julien and McGee were removed from the project, which caused Julien to quickly write another script, a western called Thomasine and Bushrod.

Max Julien’s original script for Thomasine and Bushrod is a confrontational and genre bending work posing as a take on Arthur Penn’s influential Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Focusing on a fictional outlaw in the old west named Bushrod and his partner in crime and love, a former female bounty hunter named Thomasine, who steals from the rich in order to help out various minorities, Julien’s script and the final film would delight in reversing gender roles, questioning accepted history and rethinking the western genre as a whole.

Thomasine and Bushrod is a flawed production, hampered by a quick shooting schedule on a low budget in a scorching New Mexico summer, yet remains downright ingenious in the way it confounds so many expectations. There are several things that separate the film from almost any other before or since with the most obvious being that it would have African American protagonists in the old west. The most daring move the film makes though is with MgGee’s character Thomasine who is placed in the clearly more traditionally masculine role. Not only does her name come first in the title, but the character of Thomasine is shown time and time again to be smarter, stronger, more controlled and more interesting than the weaker Bushrod. Julien’s script suggests strongly a rethinking of not only the Western genre in the placing of African Americans as the leads but also in its forceful questioning of clear gender roles.

Parks as a director obviously understood the subtleties of Julien’s script and how subversive it was. Filming McGee often from lower angles to give her power and authority while placing Julien much lower in the frame with the camera tilted down at him, Thomasine and Bushrod shows Parks to be a sensitive and intelligent stylist. This role as a stylist also distinguishes the film in another way, which is perhaps even more subversive than the gender and race relations it delights in subverting.

Thomasine and Bushrod's biggest attribute is one of its most surprising, that being how much Parks, Julien and McGee chose to highlight that it was a film made in 1973 about 1873. Not content with making a mere historically accurate piece, Parks fills nearly every frame of the film with visual references to the seventies, a move that makes it clearly more about the period it was made in than the period it was set in. The outlandish and stylish costume design by Andrea Lilly and Mcgee herself, the hair styles, the soundtrack (which features a title track by San Francisco band Love) and even some of the dialogue are clearly products of the seventies. Many critics mis-viewed this as laziness and lack of research on the part of Parks and Julien, but today it looks to be a clear headed and deliberate decision on their parts that goes along perfectly with the other subversive thematic elements of the film. Thomasine and Bushrod isn’t a film attempting to be historically accurate, it is instead a work that questions just what accuracy means in cinema.

Parks film was released briefly in the summer of 1973 with a half hearted ad campaign by Columbia attempting to capitalize on the real life relationship between Julien and McGee. The film failed to attract an audience and the critical community mostly ignored the production, although Nora Sayre in The New York Times found much to admire and picked up on how “utterly contemporary” the film was deliberately trying to be. The only other point of recognition came in late 1973 when Julien’s script was nominated for an NAACP award, which it lost.

Outside of a handful of television airings, Thomasine and Bushrod was pulled from circulation in 1973 and has never had a home video release. It is virtually a lost film. The films failure hurt all three of the main player’s careers. McGee spent the rest of her career in mostly supporting roles while Julien dropped out of sight for nearly a quarter of a century. He resurfaced in the late nineties as his role in The Mack gained more and more popularity, but Thomasine and Bushrod was his swan song as a lead actor and a screenwriter.
-Jeremy Richey-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (24) Stacy Keach in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

"In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration. But given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance? Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in God."

Savannah born Stacy Keach was nearing forty when William Peter Blatty cast him the role of his career as the unforgettable Col. Vincent Kane, one of the most fractured and ultimately heroic characters in all of modern cinema.  A much-honored Shakespearean-stage performer, accomplished musician and television star Stacy Keach has had quite a life and career but, for me, his shining moment as an artist came under Blatty's startling direction in The Ninth Configuration, a film and book that has haunted me for most of my adult life.  

Keach began his film career in 1968 with a part in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a film that was originally going to star Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor.  Throughout the seventies Keach rotated successfully between the big and small screen and he found work with such heavyweight filmmakers as John Huston, Robert Altman, Ridley Scott and even Sergio Martino!  While Keach arguably wouldn't become a 'star' until his run as television's 'Mike Hammer' in the eighties his screen run in the seventies is still quite impressive and has many rich performances worthy of rediscovery.  

The plum role of Blatty's doomed Col. Vincent Kane was an ideal one for a Shakespearean trained actor like Keach as it had all the tragic, dramatic (and even comedic) elements of the best of Shakespeare's characters.    Amazingly Keach hadn't been Blatty's first choice, although he had been for The Exorcist's Father Damien Karras, a role which Keach famously turned down. In Blatty, Keach found a rare modern writer with a dazzling handle of the English language, a perfect ear for dialogue and a rare insight into the human psyche and soul.  While the whole ensemble cast of The Ninth Configuration is quite astonishing, Keach's performance as the crazed 'Killer Kane' (who is either in charge or, or a ward of, an isolated asylum) looking for spiritual redemption is particularly miraculous and unbelievably rich.  

One of the great modern films, The Ninth Configuration was greeted with a mixture of praise, scorn and bewilderment upon its initial release and Keach's Oscar worthy work was lost in the shuffle.  Re-released in a variety of different versions since, The Ninth Configuration can currently be seen in a DVD version that has some marvelous extras but a lousy transfer.  A fully-restored Blu-ray of Blatty's masterpiece is much-much needed.  

Now in his seventies, Stacy Keach continues to work steadily and always provides excellent work no matter how small the role or slight the material.  More information on his life and career can be found here at his official site.  For more on The Ninth Configuration please visit this comprehensive site.  

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (25) Lesleh Donaldson in FUNERAL HOME (WITH A SPECIAL GUEST CONTRIBUTION FROM LESLEH DONALDSON)

I remember very clearly the first time I saw the striking Canadian born Lesleh Donaldson in a film.  I was in my mid-teens and the film was the classic 1981 slasher Happy Birthday to Me and Lesleh's brief, but very memorable appearance, as Bernadette O'Hara immediately caught my eye.  A bit later, via another battered but treasured old VHS tape I caught up with Lesleh's most famous role, that of Christie Burns in the 1983 chiller Curtains.  Anyone who has seen Curtains will certainly recall Lesleh's role in that film as she is featured in, simply put, one of the most memorable and terrifying sequences in all of modern horror (a scene which did for outdoor ice skating what Jaws did for ocean swimming).

Lesleh's name will be eternally tied to the early eighties slasher craze that meant so much to so many film fans from my generation, even though she only appeared in a few films from the genre.  Beautiful and talented, with an especially warm quality that comes through in even the smallest role, Lesleh graced a number of films and television shows throughout the seventies but never got the break she should have which is one reason that Funeral Home is so special.

The 1980 William Fruet directed Funeral Home gave Lesleh one of the much deserved leading roles that alluded her most of her career and she really makes the most of it.  Barely sixteen when she shot the film, Lesleh is truly splendid in this chilling little-seen film and she totally deserved the Genie nomination she received for her performance.  Funeral Home isn't a perfect film but Lesleh's performance in it is and it serves as a sharp reminder that many more leading roles should have come her way.

Flash forward from that initial viewing of Happy Birthday to Me all the years ago to just a couple of years back when I became friends with Lesleh over at Facebook.  While making contact with your idols often proves disastrous Lesleh and I sparked up a nice friendship and share similiar tastes in music, film, art and politics.  In the first of a few surprises this month, Lesleh has kindly agreed to share a few thoughts on Funeral Home for my readers here at Moon in the Gutter and I am oh so excited to be able to offer this contribution from her.  Thanks so much to Lesleh for stopping by and sharing these thoughts and I hope everyone will track down a copy of Funeral Home!

- Lesleh Donaldson on FUNERAL HOME written for Moon in the Gutter-

"I remember when I was filming FUNERAL HOME aka: CRIES IN THE NIGHT people would ask me what movie I was doing and most of them would perk up and say to me " Oh my God what is Jamie Lee Curtis like?" I of course would smile and say "you must mean PROM NIGHT" then they would look at me embarrassed and say 'oh yeah sorry'. Well at the time back then I desperately wanted to be in PROM NIGHT and MY BLOODY VALENTINE and all the other cool films that had a group of teenagers trapped in some godforsaken situation with an axe wielding maniac on the loose. I actually did get to go on to do a film like that shortly after FUNERAL HOME, but what makes FUNERAL HOME special to me, and I think makes it stand out from the rest of those films at that time, is an atmospheric quality it had and of course the William Fruet touch (anyone who has seen WEDDING IN WHITE will know what I'm talking about). 
Bill Fruet had an ability to capture a part of rural, isolated living that was a big part of Canadian cinema back in those days and not only did he capture the loneliness and isolation of these people, whether it was in a horror movie or just a gut wrenching tale of humanity, but he captured it so that it seems time capsuled. FUNERAL HOME has a lot of faults as a film but to me it is a part of the Canadian cinema that has long gone. I'm proud to have been a part of it and it will always hold a special place in my heart!"

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (26) Charles Napier in SUPERVIXENS (1975)

By the early seventies, Kentucky born Charles Napier was pretty much fed up with acting.  He had been working steadily in film and television since the late sixties but, as he was approaching forty, he was bored with performing and had began working for a trucking magazine called Overdrive.  Napier's biggest champion, legendary filmmaker Russ Meyer, had a new part in mind for Napier though and courted the imposing actor back into cinematic playing field with what Meyer biographer Jimmy McDonough would call "the greatest role of Charles Napier's weird career." in his essential Big Bosoms and Square Jaws.

Watching Charles Napier's incredibly jolting and terrifying performance as Harry Sledge in Meyer's masterpiece Supervixens (1975) today it is impossible to imagine any other actor in the role. Channeling an extreme misogynistic macho-male energy passed the point of wrong into the realm of psychotic, the six-foot Napier is beyond imposing as Sledge...he's positively monstrous and, more importantly, absolutely brilliant.  Harry Sledge is the kind of role most actors would have run away from, or at the very least attempted to soften, but Napier inhabits it completely and devours the screen in one of the most ferocious performances in film history.

Supervixens is a dazzling work by an angry artist looking to show that he still had at least one major masterpiece left in him and he didn't need any damn studio backing to deliver it.  Meyer's film is a breathtaking and brutal experience and it contains his most astonishing momenst as a filmmaker (and, perhaps most importantly, editor) during the legendary bathtub fight sequence between Napier and stunning Shari Eubank (whose work in Supervixens could have appeared on this list as well).  The sequence, which would serve as inspiration for an equally brilliant fight between Patricia Arquette and James Gandolfini in Tony Scott's True Romance year later, is absolutely jaw-dropping not just for its brutality and ugliness but also for just how technically brilliant it is and how incredible both Napier and Eubank are.  It's an absolute stunner.

There is really nothing else in cinema quite like Supervixens and there has never been anything quite like Charles Napier's performance as Harry Sledge.  The role and film would re energize Napier's passion for acting and he would go onto have one of the most prolific careers in all of modern film and television.  He worked right up to his death in 2011 and he remains one of the great cinematic gifts my state ever offered up.

More of my thoughts on Supervixens and Charles Napier's work as Harry Sledge can be read in the upcoming Directory of World Cinema:  American Independent 2, which is due out in January for those  interested.    

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (27) Dalila Di Lazzaro in THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE (1977)

One of the most searing, thoughtful and touching performances ever given in an Italian genre film was delivered in 1977 by a former Fashion model who is sadly still almost exclusively just known for her looks rather than her considerable skills as an actress.  Dalila Di Lazzaro hadn't even turned twenty-five when she was cast as the doomed title-character in Flavio Mogherini's gruelling and hypnotic La ragazza dal pigiama giallo.  The Italian born Lazzaro had already become a staple of Italian Genre films in the seventies but most filmmakers were content to use her just for her lovely body and perfect face, but Mogherini had different things in mind and trusted that there was a whole lot of depth and untapped power behind those striking eyes and boy was he right. 
Lazzaro is incredibly compelling in The Pyjama Girl Case and her work as Glenda Blythe remains one of the defining performances of the Italian Giallo (although Mogherini's film pushes the definition of the Giallo to the absolute extreme).  Lazzaro's performance is incredibly captivating, extremely moving and finally quite heartbreaking.  I wish more filmmakers would have recognized just how truly great she was, as The Pyjama Girl Case is one of the few films where she really got to show her range as an actor and performer. 
The Pyjama Girl Case is available from Blue Underground and it remains one of my favorite Italian films from the seventies.  Dalila Di Lazzaro would continue to work steadily, and do solid work,  in film and television before retiring in the late nineties but she was never again be given a role that equaled that of Glenda Blythe.  Lazzaro's work in The Pyjama Girl Case remains one of the most haunting and unsettling characterizations in all of modern film. 

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (28) Pierre Clémenti in PARTNER (1968)

Parisian born Pierre Clémenti could be simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, savage and tender, perverse and poetic.  He was an enigma, a genius and one of the best screen actors I have ever seen.  By the time of his death in 1999, Clémenti had worked with many of the greatest European filmmakers, spent time in prison, penned a book, directed his own underground films, and had even got name-checked in a song by Patti Smith, and yet he still never managed to truly break through with English language audiences like many of his peers.  

My favorite performance from Pierre Clémenti can be found in Bernardo Bertolucci's dazzling and frustrating Godard inspired Partner (1968).  While his work from the same period for filmmakers like Bunuel and Pasolini might have gained more attention, Clémenti as the double Giacobbe is a performance of astonishing force and veers successfully from the absurd to the surreal to finally something achingly human.  Partner might well be the most flawed of Bertolucci's great films but with Clémenti he found one of his ideal performers and it is still breathtaking watching this strangely unhinged, and yet supremely controlled, artist all the years later.  

The best way to see Partner is via No Shame's now out of print double-disc set that came out several years back.  It's filled with a number of enlightening extras and has some haunting behind the scenes clips of Clémenti, an artist who was at his peak in 1968 when the footage was captured.  

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-