AN AMERICAN DREAM (1966)

War hero Stuart Whitman is now a popular TV commentator who answers phone calls on the air; his current crusade is exposing links between the Mafia and the police department. During his current show, he gets a taunting call from his drunken wife (Eleanor Parker, pictured) as she dallies with another man in her bed. They're separated and she's just back from Europe but won't give Whitman a divorce. On the phone, she babbles almost incoherently, calling him a "boy crusader" and wondering how he became a war hero when he's "such a whimpering baby, baby, baby." After the show, he heads to her place where they have an argument right out Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. On her balcony, they come to blows. He tries to strangle her, but she winds up falling off the balcony where she hits the street and is then hit by several cars, causing a pile-up. Whitman tells the police that her fall was an accident, then he says she was trying to kill herself because she had cancer. As it happens, one of the cars in the pile-up is occupied by one of the Mafia dons that Whitman has been attacking, and accompanying him is Whitmans' ex-mistress (Janet Leigh), whom Whitman knocked up and abandoned a few years ago. The two start to get close again which doesn't make the Mafia guy happy. The cops, also unhappy, are out to get Whitman because of his accusations of corruption. Meanwhile, Parker's rich father is willing to use his power to subvert the suicide verdict because otherwise, the monsignor can't give Parker a Catholic burial. In the midst of all this, it's getting difficult for Whitman's agent to get him top dollar with a new contract. It seems that Whitman's American dream might be turning into a nightmare.

This bizarre melodrama is best appreciated as camp. It's hard to pin down what's wrong with it, although Whitman's wooden performance is a good starting place—his character is charmless and uninteresting. The direction, by Robert Gist, is lackluster, and there is no coherent visual style to the movie, though Parker's apartment is pretty fabulous. This will sound like a contradiction, but Parker's performance is the best and worst thing in the movie. In her short fifteen minutes at the beginning, she starts at level 11 (out of 10) and goes up from there. At first, I found her grating and artificial, but her drunken hysteria set a kind of anti-Zen trance mood, during which I couldn't keep my eyes off of her. She is terrible and wonderful and riveting at the same time, and is ultimately the main reason to watch the movie. Much as I like Janet Leigh, she can't compete, especially given her under-written character. Barry Sullivan, as the main cop, is fine, as is Murray Hamilton as Whitman's agent, and Lloyd Nolan in what is basically a cameo as Parker's father. George Takei appears briefly as a cop. Without giving away the context, I'll quote the last line of the movie, which is  classic: "What did you expect from a whore?" Gist, the director, has a very small role in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET as the guy placing reindeer figures in the shop window when Kris Kringle stops to chat, and was the director's assistant in THE BAND WAGON. [TCM]