Henry Jaglom Trying to Show Female "Emotional Truth" in "A Safe Place" (1971)

Criterion's set of DVDs from the production unit within Columbia Pictures headed by Bob Rafelson and Burt Schneider after the success of the television series "The Monkees" provides extra-filled discs of seven movies, beginning with the bomb "Head" (1968, directed by Rafelson, cowritten by Jack Nicholson) which finished off the screen career of the ersatz band. That disaster was followed by the huge success of "Easy Rider" (1969, directed by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda with a breakout performance by Jack Nicholson) that ensured funding for the memorable "Five Easy Pieces" (1970, directed by Rafelson), the movie that made Nicholson a movie star. Raybert, which became BBS Productions with the addition of Steve Blauner, had great freedom within the crumbling studio system. Nicholson directed "Drive, He Said" (with writer-directors of the future Robert Towne and Henry Jaglom in featured roles).

A black-and-white movie set in a dying 1950s Texas town probably seemed a bigger risk than a movie about a child-woman played by Tuesday Weld, who seemed on the verge of becoming a big star (but did not). Larry McMurtry was not well known at the time, and Peter Bodganovich was known as a historian of Hollywood auteurs (John Ford, Orson Welles). His first attempt at directing a movie became one of the canonical great American movies, "The Last Picture Show" (1971), making stars of Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, and Cybill Shepherd; and providing Oscar-winning roles to Hollywood veterans Ben Johnson and Cloris Leacham.

The BBS sibling (not an identical twin by any means), "A Safe Place," directed by actor and stage-director Henry Jaglom, based on a play(titled "The Uncommon Denominator") that he had done with his then-girlfriend Karen Black and Phil Proctor, was a commercial flop. It would be wrong to say that it perplexed 1971 audiences, because very few people saw it. Jack Nicholson took the part of the male Id than Jaglom had played onstage (Mitch is the character's name), Tuesday Weld became the centerpiece Noah (Ego?), and Proctor reprised his role as Fred (the Superego and/or rejected Reality Principle). A gentle trickster/magician part was added for Orson Welles. The three man exist in the film only in relationship to Noah, a young woman who is unwilling or unable to grow up. In a 2009 extra, Jaglom says the part is a third Karen Black, a third Tuesday Weld, and a third himself. He claims successfully to have resisted growing up himself. And without such an aim, Tuesday Weld had been 16 on screen from 1959 (on "Dobie Gilis" when she really was 16 at least through 1968 ("Pretty Poison").

Forewarned that the film was "non-narrative" and that Jaglom was enamored by European art films, especially the phantasmagorical ones of Federico Fellini, and with a considerable background in European art films of the decade preceding "A Safe Place," I was still not much impressed by it. I enjoyed the Central Park scenes with the gentle (and rotund but not yet huge) Orson Welles and Weld. I also liked the art in the apartment Fred is borrowing (from his parents who are traveling in Europe). I could see why Noah might respond to the aggressions of Mitch when he dropped in and why Fred would be dismayed. But I did not find Weld's Noah particularly interesting.

I didn't know that Jaglom was an admirer of Anais Nin (1903-77) and aiming to show female interiority on the screen the way she did on the page. At the time Nin had a following among women who viewed themselves as sexually liberated. Though her posthumously published erotic stories written during the 1940s, Delta of Venus and The Little Birds, became best-sellers, they seem to have obliterated interest in her as a writer (self-dramatizing diarist and author of some novels, at least one of which I once read). Nin wrote a blurb for the movie, but the movie was completely eclipsed by "The Last Picture Show." In an interview clip in "The BBS Story" (which is on the Criterion "Five Easy Pieces" disc), Jaglom recalls a theater duplex in which both movies were playing in which the staff directed those who had purchased ticked for "A Safe Place" (upstairs) to "The Last Picture Show" (on the main floor).

A very interesting bonus feature on the "A Safe Place" disc that I almost didn't watch has a half-hour tv interview of Bodganovich and Jaglom on the eve of the first showings of the two movies at the New York Film Festival from October 1971. Jaglom wastes his screen time blabbering about how the gestalt of his movie's flow cannot be excerpted, while Bogdanovich has interesting things to say about Ben Johnson, the difficulty of a tracking scene with Burstyn and Shepherd. Any of the three excerpts from "The Last Picture Show" would make me want to watch the movie. One of the two from "A Safe Place" is one of the best (though completely pointless) scenes from the movie, a rooftop discussion between Noah and Fred of romance of the names of exchanges (BUtterfield, etc.) being sacrificed to the blandness of numbers (18 in the instance of BUtterfield).

The DVD also has a commentary track, some deleted scenes, and screen tests. The Haskell interview reveals that Jaglom filmed Bogdanovich, but did not use any of the footage of him. As Jaglom says, Bogdanovich had cut the movie in his head before he shot it (Hitchcock-like). Jaglom shot a lot of film (50+ hours) and tried to make something from selecting pieces from the pile.

Perhaps I should leave it to female viewers to decide whether Jaglom found the "emotional truth" of women (or the Woman/Animal) here (or in Robert Altman's 1977 "Three Women" or Woody Allen's "Interiors"--or Ingmar Bergman's 1966 "Persona"). I think the film has some interesting shots and images, and very showy mise-en-scene (not as jagged and arbitrary as that in "Head" and "Drive, He Said," more like that in "Five Easy Pieces"), but I think that Nicholson (in the 2009 footage on the "Drive, He Said" disc was right that if something only happens in a character's head, it has to go (not be filmed). I wonder if he told Jaglom that at the time.

I wonder if "A Safe Place" would have been better with Karen Black, the prime BBS actress (supplanted by Ellen Burstyn, whom I think was too old for the part). Tuesday Weld had many chances to become a superstar, refused some (Lolita, Bonnie and Clyde, True Grit) and lacked the charisma to become an American Liv Ullmann herein. She could hold the screen with Proctor, but not with Nicholson or Welles. They had charisma. (As did Burstyn, and Gena Rowlands in the films of her husband John Cassaveates...).

Another highly fragmented "anti-movie" that also played at the 1971 NYFF, Dusan Makavejev's "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" is more interesting and was appreciated at least by cineastes then. Alejandro Jodorowsky's bizarre kaleidoscope "The Holy Mountain" arrived two years later. These legendarily bizarre and fragmentary films probably should be contrasted with "Head," rather than "A Safe Place." The successful (critically and commercially) explorations of Woman, I've already mentioned: the earlier "Persona," the later "Three Woman," and "Interiors," plus Bergman's "The Passion of Anna" (1969) and "Cries and Whispers" (1972) or Rowlands's Minnie in Cassaveates "Minnie and Moskowitz" (1971). And Weld failed again to hold interest in "Play It As It Lays" (1972, directed by Frank Perry), reteamed (from " Pretty Poison ") with Anthony Perkins.

The final BBS production was the also very moody "The King of Marvin Gardens," directed by Rafelson, with BBS repertoire actors Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, and Jack Nicholson. Momentum (and Nicholson) shifted to Paramount and Robert Evans (The Godfather [1972] Chinatown [1974]. Bert Schneider left the business after producing "Days of Heaven (1978, directed by Terrence Malick, who worked on the "Drive He Said" script). Rafelson produced and directed the so-so 1981 remake of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" with Nicholson and Jessica Lange; directed the 1987 cult classic "Black Widow"(starring Debra Winger, Theresa Russell, and Sami Frey with Dennis Hopper topping the supporting cast) and the largely unseen (but which I remember as quite visually impressive) 1990 "Mountains of the Moon" shot in Africa by Roger Deakins (the go-to guy of the Coen brothers since "Barton Fink" [1991], who also did "Kundun," "The Reader" and ": The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford").

The only other movie directed by Henry Jaglom that I have seen is his second, "Tracks" (1977) starring BBS alumnus Dennis Hopper cracking up across the country (what a stretch! but that time by train with an army haircut) accompanying the body of a friend slain in Vietnam. It is a mess with an ending, however trite an ending it is, but not fading away in a bubble bath with the bubble-headed girl-woman inexplicably named Noah.

P.S. Links Yahoo/AC is not displaying in this review (each of which I tried to link at least three times)

Pretty Poison www.epinions.com/content_554368929412

Drive, He Said www.associatedcontent.com/article/8162135/a_good_college_basketball_movie_intercut.html?cat=37

Interiors www.epinions.com/review/mvie_mu-1010619/content_270349012612

Tracks www.epinions.com/content_542087941764