This week’s column is a sublime interview with the great Jane Fonda, and I would have hated myself if I’d wrapped it up without asking her about two of my movie club’s all-time faves.
There’s the bizarre racial melodrama Hurry Sundown and the darkly sexy Walk on the Wild Side, set in a New Orleans brothel.
“I think Hurry Sundown is just plain bad,” admitted Jane.
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“But Walk on the Wild Side is interesting. To work with Barbara Stanwyck, Anne Baxter, and Laurence Harvey, it was an interesting experience.
“My first movie was Tall Story and I thought I’d never do another movie in Hollywood. I hated the experience. Then I got offered Kitty Twist [her prostitute-turned-hero character in Wild Side] and she was so different and so not the girl-next-door cheerleader, that I decided to do that and that’s what got me back in.”
By the way, Stanwyck plays Jo, the bordello madam who has a legless husband and who’s in love with a sculptor/whore played by the icy Capucine.
A new book called Barbara Stanwyck, The Miracle Woman by Dan Callahan says columnist Louella Parsons was outraged that Stanwyck would play such a role.
Replied the actress, “What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?”
Alas, the author adds, “Capucine is such a weak and bored scene partner that Stanwyck has to work in a kind of void.”
Not that Stanwyck’s role is that amazing, he adds:
“Jo Courtney is a shallow conception, a woman who needs to be ‘explained’ by some Penguin Freud, a lesbian who doesn’t even get to be a real lesbian…
“Instead, we’re made to understand that she’s frigid.”
The film, Callahan writes, “is only enlivened by a baby-faced Jane Fonda, shaking her chassis as a runaway-turned-hooker” and by the great credits sequence involving a cat and a theme song.
And let’s not forget Anne Baxter as a Mexican lady with a taco stand slash religious temple.
Anyway, thank you, Jane, for our walk on the stimulating side.
