Friday, July 15, 2016

Flashback: "Inserts"


Warning: The following review contains spoilers.

"The syphilitic perverts that are going to spend 

  money to see this film don't even know that 
  they have eyeballs."
  Richard Dreyfuss as the Boy Wonder

"It was your last shot, and you blew it."
  Bob Hoskins as Big Mac

"Tell me what are inserts."
  Jessica Harper as Cathy Cake

    The first time I saw "Inserts", I didn't like it very much.
    It was right around New Year's 1980 and I was hanging out with some friends in St. Louis, and one night we went to an art house to see a double feature - "Inserts" and "Last Tango In Paris". We were all dead tired. (Who knows? Maybe we'd been partying.) We made it through "Inserts" more or less intact, but after that, nobody had the stamina to take on two hours of a brooding Marlon Brando. So we left.
    About all I remember from that first screening is Richard Dreyfuss trying to get Jessica Harper to do a sex scene, and Dreyfuss at the end of the film playing the piano and singing. The movie as a whole didn't leave much of an impression. I was real tired. 
    "Inserts" first came out overseas in 1975 (the same year Dreyfuss made "Jaws"), and had its brief American run the following year. Of all the convention-rattling, proto-indie movies that slipped into theaters back then, it's hard to think of one that took more risks, or got more widely panned, dismissed, ignored and forgotten. Which is too bad, because, viewed again some 40 years later, it's an interesting little film, a funny and utterly perverse black comedy. 
    The story takes place around 1930. Dreyfuss plays a character called the Boy Wonder, a washed-up director of silent films, reduced to cranking out stag reels in his home, when he's not otherwise occupied drinking himself to death. And, oh yeah, he's impotent. Veronica Cartwright plays his leading lady, a sprightly hophead named Harlene. Stephen Davies plays the stud, a functional idiot known professionally as Rex the Wonder Dog. Bob Hoskins plays the producer, a gruff, unscrupulous bastard named Big Mac. Harper plays the producer's girlfriend, who's not nearly as innocent as anybody thinks. Her name - I'm not kidding - is Cathy Cake. 
    The producer stops by the set with his girlfriend on a day when the shooting is not going well. (You get a strong sense that for these people, the shooting never goes well.) The producer wants to make sure the work is getting done. The girlfriend wants to see what making movies is all about. The producer gives the junkie some dope and she promptly o.d.s on it, and after some requisite wrangling, Rex and Big Mac take Harlene out for a stealth burial, leaving Cathy Cake alone with the Boy Wonder, who now has no leading lady and a half-finished film. What's left to shoot, specifically, are the "inserts," the anatomical closeups that can later be spliced into the rest of the picture. "Miss Cake" doesn't know what inserts are at first. Then the director tells her. Then she volunteers to do them. 
    There's nothing especially likeable about these characters, though there's an obvious grudging affection between the Boy Wonder and Harlene. There's certainly nothing glamorous about what they're doing. They're all dreamers on the down side of the dream, working the edge between delusion and despair. 
    The Boy Wonder knows he's making crap for cretins, but he still can't help trying to make it artistic crap. He's a silent movie director in the age of sound, a has-been with bills piling up and nothing but time on his hands. He talks wistfully about dining with Griffith and Gish, but when a "new kid," a young actor named Clark Gable, comes around, the filmmaker gives him the brush. Gable wants to get him to direct a "real movie," but the Boy Wonder can't be bothered. Not when there's a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of cognac left in the house. His wonder days, his days of accomplishing anything at all, are over, and he's not going to get a second act. He's finished. Beneath a protective layer of sarcastic wit, he's not just scared. He's paralyzed. 
    The cheerfully strung-out Harlene is in the same boat, more or less. She's just found a different narcotic to deal with it. She was a familiar face in "real movies" a few years back. Cite some obscure bit she did for De Mille once, and she can tell you immediately what year. Miss Cake remembers seeing her on the big screen back in Chicago. Now she's waiting on tables and doing this. There's a running gag involving her "favorite necktie" that evolves into something truly morbid. 
    Of all of them, Rex is probably the most genuinely deluded, and the least equipped to know about it. He has an upcoming appointment at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a big shot from Metro who thinks he has "star potential" - a phony setup only he fails to recognize. He talks about having "a name in the funeral business," when he's really just a gravedigger at a nearby cemetery. His acting is beyond stiff, and he can't make a move without knocking something over or bumping into a wall. His "star potential" is probably being realized in this stuffy, depressing room. 
    Big Mac can see the future, and it's hamburgers. ("Big Mac" - get it?) The new freeways are going in - the Boy Wonder's house will be knocked down to make way for one - and Big Mac has visions of identical hamburger stands all up and down the road. He talks about producing "real movies," too, but whether he means that, or just sees it as a ticket into Miss Cake's pants, is hard to say. He's crude and amoral and ruthless. He might just get what he wants. 
    Miss Cake, with her big dark eyes and Kewpie-doll face, can play the little-girl act when it works to her advantage, and play against it, too. Calculating and observant, she's realistic about her chances of breaking into movies, but she wants to see and know everything, and she's willing to do anything to get what she wants. "Tell me what are inserts," she says, over and over, as Big Mac and the Boy Wonder dodge the question. Her willingness to go all the way, when it comes time to shoot them, takes even the Boy Wonder by surprise. She's more eager to perform than he thinks, and she turns the tables on him. 
    Whatever real or imagined glory might lie ahead or behind them, they've come together to make this squalid stag film. They're all sucking shit off the bottom of the pool, and they know it. They can see it in each other. They just can't admit it to themselves. 
    In fact, it's an open question whether there are any limits to how low they'd be willing to go. When Harlene turns up dead with a needle in her arm, Big Mac's only concern is how to get rid of the body, and the Boy Wonder seems perfectly willing to finish the picture by shooting the stud with the corpse. 
    Most high-end Hollywood movies dealing with the skin trade feel hollow at the core. Blame it on the commercial demand for an R rating. "The People vs. Larry Flynt", released 20 years ago, took its case all the way to the Supreme Court, on screen, at least, and still couldn't show its audience what it was supposed to be about. In the years since then, nothing much has changed. 
    "Inserts", made cheaply in England and rated X, gets closer to the subject than most. It's not hardcore, and that encounter late in the picture between Harper and Dreyfuss would play better in the context of the story if it were less discreet. When the two of them finally get it on, Richard doesn't even take his robe off, and when the climax comes, the whole point of a very long scene, it's done with a tight closeup of their faces. But for most of the picture, the language is graphic, the nudity is matter-of-fact, and the acrobatic humping Rex and Harlene engage in is frenzied, exuberant and wildly silly. Simulated or not, their commitment to their work is breathtaking. 
    It all plays out in real time, on a single set. The feeling is clammy and claustrophobic. You can practically smell the sweat the stale booze and cigarette smoke. It's L.A., so you know that outside the sun is shining, but you'd never know it here. The Boy Wonder never leaves the house. 
    The acting is uniformly fine, with a special nod to the fully frontal Veronica Cartwright, whose uninhibited performance boldly goes where few name actresses would dare to, then or now. Harper's character breaks loose, too, once she gets into it, and spends much of the picture's second half casually topless. By then it's become clear that what turns them all on, much more than sex, is film, and that's what the movie's really about. They talk a lot about "peaking," but nobody really peaks till the camera rolls. 
    When the producer leaves at the end, he takes the film with him. It's a cruel joke. He knows it's not what the director wanted to get, that even within the modest requirements of stag movies, it's an embarrassing failure. But as the opening credits make clear, those two or three minutes of faked intercourse, all mugging and thrashing in silent, scratched-up black and white, are going to be around to be viewed and laughed at long after all of them are gone. 
    It's the ultimate blessing and curse of the movies.
    Immortality has a price tag, after all.

INSERTS  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
Writer/Director: John Byrum
Cast: Richard Dreyfuss (Boy Wonder)
          Jessica Harper (Cathy Cake)
          Veronica Cartwright (Harlene)
          Bob Hoskins (Big Mac)
          Stephen Davies (Rex the Wonder Dog)

Rated X. Contains nudity, language, drug use 
and lively, simulated sex.

"Better turn out the lights. 
  The bulbs are gonna burn out."
  Veronica Cartwright as Harlene