Holly Woodlawn Takes Manhattan in Musical Comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers

SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS 

(Robert J. Kaplan, USA, 1972, 82 minutes) 

I'm not certain if Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was the first film to feature a trans woman in the lead, but it was surely one of the first to simply let her be her authentic self. 

Something similar could be said of Paul Morrissey's 1971 Andy Warhol-produced feminist satire Women in Revolt, which also features trans superstar Holly Woodlawn, in addition to Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis.

Woodlawn may have been trans in real life--though she didn't use the term--but Eve, the character she plays in this film, comes across as cisgender. She's just a Midwestern girl looking to make her name in the Big Apple.

 

As with its star, the cast came primarily from Warhol's Factory, Off-Broadway, burlesque revues, and the world of bathhouse entertainment. 

Bette Midler associate Jerry Blatt composed the music, and Midler sings most of the songs: "Get It On" and "Nothin Goin' Down at All" (both with Mike Lincoln), "Love Theme," and the lovely "Strawberry, Lilac and Lime."

 

In her breathless 1991 memoir, A Low Life in High Heels (with Jeffrey Kenneth Copeland), Woodlawn describes her third feature as "a riotous romp of oddities and mishaps" that took three months to shoot. There were ups and downs, but for the most part she had a blast, though director Robert J. Kaplan did tell her that if she didn't stop drinking, he would pull the plug, and so she did…though she reverted to her old ways once filming wrapped. 

 

Predicting the loopy suburbanites of John Waters' filmography, the cheeky comedy–pun intended–opens with a set of clueless parents looking down at the camera, and wishing their unseen daughter well as she leaves home. As they turn to enter the house behind them, Kaplan reveals that they aren't wearing any pants or skirts or even underwear. Just two bare bottoms. 

 

Significantly, the film was released the same year as Lou Reed's ode to some of the Factory's brightest lights, "Walk on the Wild Side," which immortalized Woodlawn, Darling, and Curtis and would become better known than Kaplan's film, which also follows a young-woman-in-the-big-city story line. 

"Holly," as Reed spoke-sang, "Came from Miami, F-L-A, hitch-hiked her way across the USA, plucked her eyebrows along the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she…she says, 'Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side'...said, 'Hey honey, take a walk on the wild side'."

 

While Emmaretta Marks, an original Hair cast member, sings the title song, "Scarecrow," a bus makes its way from Topeka, Kansas to New York City where Eve gets off with her luggage. Instead of a cab, she grabs a ride with a nun who predicts the ride-hailing drivers of more recent vintage. She's driving a cab (poorly) in order to earn enough money to take the orphanage to see Jesus Christ Superstar. After swearing at another driver, she drops Eve off at the Chelsea Hotel, where much of the filming took place. 

 

After settling in, Eve connects with her fashionable friend, "Margo Channing" (Yafa Lerner), who has a side line in sex work, so men assume Eve does, too, but she just wants to act. She's also pretty naïve, but not stupid, and quickly figures out why strange men keep referring to Margo as "$5.95"--it's the price she charges for blow jobs (the equivalent of $45.52 today). 

 

At this point, you can probably guess Eve's last name. That’s right, it's Harrington, though Woodlawn's acting style reflects an even earlier era, since she has screwball energy. She's a very physical performer, a little like Shelley Duvall. She doesn't seem capable of standing still or keeping quiet for very long, and the expression on her elastic face is constantly changing. 

These qualities apply to Woodlawn's other early performances, too, like Holly in Morrissey's 1970 film Trash, except that's a darker work overall, even if Woodlawn brings the light. In Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay's insightful 2024 book, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, the authors describe her as "wildly expressive." Though they don't cover Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, they do discuss Trash and Women in Revolt in a section titled "The Warhol Superstars: Pioneers Without a Frontier."

 

As Eve explores NYC, she keeps running into a woman named "Mary Poppins" (actress and nightclub singer Tally Brown, another Factory figure) traveling with a harem of hunky men. While Eve is thin, awkward, and discreet, Mary is zaftig, confident, and extravagant. She also has some of the highest hair and thickest false eyelashes I've ever seen. Though in part because of the era in which it was made and the milieu in which it takes place, the makeup and costuming throughout are truly show-stopping. 

 

Margo, who is preparing to leave town, introduces Eve to Mary in hopes she can help her find an apartment. She also encourages her to spiff up her look, so Eve gives herself a glam makeover, except no one notices until she meets "Rhett Butler" (Woodlawn in male drag). Their meet-cute at a snooty party is truly cute--and pre-dates Oscar-nominated trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón's male drag in last year's Emilia Pérez by a whopping 52 years.  

Rhett, a producer who speaks with a Bela Lugosi accent, invites Eve to his brownstone. She's thinking about her career, while he's thinking about…something else. This sequence, which begins in total darkness, takes a brief swerve into horror territory before Eve makes her escape. 

 

Once the dust settles, she meets up with Mary, after which Brown sings a number on screen. Her throwback aesthetic lies somewhere between Bessy Smith and Janis Joplin, though more kittenish than either. In the lyrics, she says she came to NYC from Texas. 

Eve sings, too, and though Woodlawn has less of a voice, her charisma combined with the sparkly outfits, pretty boys, and Busby Berkeley-on-a-budget set design goes a long way. That sequence plays out in black and white. Another plays out in shades of brown, like a daguerreotype, and yet another plays out in still images, like Chris Marker's La Jetée--but faster. 

 

If there's a theme to Sandra Scoppettone's sole screenplay, it's that all these women came to the city to make a name for themselves, and that straight men can be a real pain in the ass (the men surrounding Mary appear to be gay). As two potential roommates, "Baby" and "Jane Hudson" (Kathryn and Margaret Howell), put it, "Men are nothing but little boys who have never grown up. They're selfish, evil, egotistical, sex crazy, and repressed." 

Eve and Mary both have some pretty not-so-great encounters with heterosexual men, though the last straight guy Eve meets, a diminutive wrestler named "Joe Buck" (Sonny Boy Hayes) is not so bad...though his sister is another story.

 

Scoppettone, a playwright and author of YA and mystery novels, was already out, more or less, when she got involved with the project. When Holly's boozing got out of control, Kaplan extricated her from the Chelsea Hotel, and sent her off to stay with Sandra, a former alcoholic, and her girlfriend. 

Not so coincidentally, one of Scoppettone's best known novels, 1976's The Late Great Me, dramatizes a teen's battle with the bottle. The book proved such a sensation that it was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning ABC After School Special, The Late Great Me! Story of a Teenage Alcoholic, in 1979. 

 

Eve's adventures in roommate-wrangling continue until the very end of the picture, at which point she decides to move to Hollywood, which seems to come from out of nowhere, though Holly's name seems to insist upon it.  

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was designed for maximum enjoyment, and that's what it delivers. Kaplan, by way of Scoppettone, doesn't appear to be trying to deliver a political message, though presenting a trans performer in such an unconflicted, uncomplicated way is political by its very nature. 

 

The film has been compared to the work of Robert Downey, Sr., and that makes sense in terms of his anything-goes approach to race, rather than gender or sexual orientation, in 1969's Putney Swope. Or the human form itself in 1970's Pound, in which actors play different breeds of dog. 

 

I was also reminded of Milos Forman's 1971 countercultural comedy Taking Off, and there's a degree to which all of these films and filmmakers intersect, beyond the fact that they're all set or based in NYC, since Forman would adapt Hair into a feature, and Hair co-writer Gerome Ragni--spelled "Jerome" in her memoir--was among Woodlawn's Chelsea Hotel social set.

 

Not all of it works–or works perfectly–but that's no crime when it comes to by-the-seat-of-your-pants lunacy. Instead of a pie fight, for instance, there's an ice cream brawl in Central Park, an improv class taught by sexist wackadoo "Walter Mitty" (David Margulies in his film debut), pigtailed health food nut "Ninotchka" (Suzanne Skillen), and other zaniness of that ilk. 

 

What the film reflects in 2025, however, is freedom. There was a time in American life when anything seemed possible, and this was one of those times, but life would not be easy for some of these players. Though Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, who has an audio cameo as Laugh-In phone operator Ernestine, would go on to bigger things, not everyone would follow suit.

Robert J. Kaplan, for instance, who followed up with a 1976 softcore Jaws parody called Gums, never made another film. After serving as production manager on Henry Jaglom's 1976 Tracks, he virtually disappeared. 

 

By the time of her death in 2022, Emmaretta Marks, who made an impression on rockers from Jimi Hendrix to Deep Purple--they even wrote a song about her--had lived with dementia for several years. As Margaret Hall noted in her 2022 Playbill obituary, "Ms. Marks had no formal retirement or life insurance plan; her family is currently taking donations to cover her funeral and burial expenses."

 

Seven years before, playwright and performance artist Penny Arcade had set up a GoFundMe for her friend, Holly Woodlawn, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died that same year. As Arcade put it in her appeal, "Holly gave visibility long before it was comfortable to do so and also gave thousands of people both hope and pleasure." Among those pleasures is this sweet and goofy film in which her ebullient spirit takes full flight. 

 

 

If you missed it when it played, for one night only, at this year's SIFF, the Academy Film Archive's new 4K restoration of Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers plays the Beacon Cinema on June 13. Images: the IMDb (Holly Woodlawn in closeup and in B&W with sausages), Cinema 5 Distributing / Slant (Woodlawn in Trash), Hari Nef's Instagram (Tally Brown), Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Woodlawn's big musical number), and Lost Classics of Teen Lit: 1939-1989 (The Late Great Me book cover).  

Stranger Flashback: Doom Metal Pioneer Bobby Liebling Rises from the Grave in Last Days Here

Here is a revived version of a 2012 Line Out post about Last Days Here (these posts were purged from the internet some time after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

Doom Metal Pioneer Rises from the Grave 

Posted by Kathy Fennessy on Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 12:23 PM 

LAST DAYS HERE 

(Don Argott and Demian Fenton, USA, 2012, 91 minutes) 

Liebling: German for "darling."

Don Argott and Demian Fenton's Last Days Here joins the ranks of documentaries about artists who've kept the dream alive against all odds. 

Depending on your point of view, that makes Bobby Liebling, lead singer of Pentagram, an admirable figure or a delusional one. It's also a cautionary tale about a rocker who never picked up a second trade—you too could end up in the family basement, subsisting on Fig Newtons and crack. 

Author Ian Christie (Sound of the Beast) describes Pentagram's music as "harrowing and bone-chilling," while Blue Öyster Cult producer Murray Krugman feels that the Alexandria, Virginia quartet provided the missing link between heavy metal and punk rock, like a "street Black Sabbath," but their flirtations with the big boys—KISS, Sandy Pearlman, Columbia Records, etc.—always fell flat. Sometimes they were to blame, sometimes not. 

Right: Greg Mayne, Bobby Liebling, Geof O'Keefe, and Pentagram 

At the film's outset, the rail-thin, grey-haired, crazy-eyed Liebling appears to be nearing the end of the line. If you thought Ozzy Osbourne has been looking wobbly lately, you haven't seen what 53-year-old Liebling looked like in 2007 (the film ends in 2010). 

Though he dresses like a young man in jeans and hard-rock t-shirts, there's clearly something wrong with him. His drawn face and twisted mouth could only be the result of long-term drug use or chronic illness—more likely a combination of the two. 

Bobby proceeds to acknowledge 44 years of substance abuse; 39 addicted to heroin. Bandages cover his arms and his hands bear puncture wounds. 

Accused of enabling their son, Diane and Joe Liebling, a nightclub singer and a former White House security adviser, believe in his talent, but worry that his best days are behind him. Despite evidence to the contrary, Bobby's manager, Sean "Pellet" Pelletier, who has released two collections of Pentagram material on Relapse Records, First Daze Here (The Vintage Collection) and First Daze Here Too, refuses to write him off as a lost cause. 

Pellet believes Bobby has one record left, and he wants it to receive a proper release. While he attempts to negotiate a contract with Pantera's Phil Anselmo, who runs Housecore Records, Bobby goes to detox, and events take a surprising turn: he meets a beautiful young woman, falls in love, and moves to Philadelphia--at which point, the filmmakers abandon the record-making storyline in favor of Bobby's misadventures in domesticity. 

If it seems too good to be true, it is, and his circumstances change again. And again. 

Says Pellet, "Anything that is bad for his heart, he'll do it: love, drugs, bacon." Liebling, as it turns out, has a thing for bacon pizza.

Until Bobby met Hallie, I didn't think this documentary could get more depressing, and it doesn't, but Last Days Here will try even the more hardened metal heads. I've seen a few scary movies in my time, but even David Cronenberg would recoil at the sight of Bobby's un-bandaged arms. 

A lot of recent music docs have taken on subjects who've persevered through adversity. Rock School co-directors and metal musicians Argott and Fenton don't break the mold, but they do depict a version of bottom that puts most others to shame. In that sense, it's more like Brother's Keeper. 

If it wasn't for the parents who gave him shelter and kept him fed, Liebling wouldn't still be alive, and the film ends on a high that justifies their support and that of Pellet, the best friend a guy like Bobby could ever have. 

*I found no evidence that this alignment came to fruition. 

Last Days Here plays the Grand Illusion Cinema through Thurs, June 21. The theater is located at 1403 NE 50th St in the University District. 

In an interview with Christopher Campbell, Don Argott talked about his next project: "We're working with this heavy metal band called Lamb of God. They’re embarking on a world tour that we're documenting. The film is less about the band and more about their fans around the world. Places including more troubled spots like Israel and India and Mexico. We're in the early stages of shooting, but we’re really excited about it." Images from The Film Stage (Bobby Liebling) and the IMDb (Pentagram on and off the stage).

Stranger Flashback: A Peek Inside Jonathan Furmanski's The Weird World of Blowfly

This is a revived version of a 2011 Line Out post (The Stranger purged them from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

Film/TV  |  Nov 26, 2011 at 9:05 am 

Blowfly's On-Screen Freak Party 

KATHY FENNESSY

THE WEIRD WORLD OF BLOWFLY
(Jonathan Furmanski, USA, 2010, 89 minutes)

Clarence Reid, aka Blowfly, was an odd-looking Miami cat with bizarre taste in clothes—especially his signature, sparkly, luchador-like outfit—and a fine feel for a funky groove (he had the flattened facial features of an ex-boxer). 

With his teddy bear-like growl, Reid sang stuff so unbelievably filthy that it's hard to take too much offense. After repeated exposure, it starts to sound like a low-level hum, the rantings of a street-corner crazy, or a sustained Tourette's attack. And if you don't take it literally, it can be pretty funny.

The husband and father began by writing and producing safe-for-radio Miami Sound classics like Betty Wright's "Clean Up Woman" and Gwen McCrae's "Rockin' Chair." It wasn't until 1971 that he introduced the Blowfly alter ego. At which point, he left his wife and children, and never looked back.

For his feature debut, cinematographer-turned-director Jonathan Furmanski (loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies) focuses on Blowfly's relationship with drummer/manager Tom Bowker, a super-fan who made it his business to put the entertainer back in the spotlight. 

Over the year that unfurls in the film, Blowfly lays down new tracks and goes on the road from Florida to Germany with backup players including Fishbone singer and bass player Norwood Fisher, but it's always clear who's calling the shots.

Bowker looks after Blowfly, but he also tells him what to do and when to do it. It's hard to tell if he really cares or whether he just sees the 69-year-old as a profitable "brand" (his term). Blowfly clearly resents his orders, but complies anyway, much like a child tethered to a domineering guardian.

Further, it soon becomes clear that Blowfly, despite the explicit imagery, has no interest in sex. He may brag about his prowess, but he's a drug-free Christian who finds women fundamentally unclean, much like Terrence Howard, contributing to an impression of stunted adolescence. And coming from a man with long, spindly fingernails, that's pretty rich. To be fair, though, he's got harsh words for queer, Black, and white people, too.

If you're looking for 89 minutes of fun, The Weird World of Blowfly won't be the documentary to fill that need. Though high-profile admirers, like Ice-T and Jello Biafra, testify to his influence and importance, Furmanski tells a pretty sad story, though I enjoyed the footage of Henry Rollins rocking out at a live gig and Isaac Hayes providing piano accompaniment for Reid's infamous Otis Redding parody "Shittin' on the Dock of the Bay." 

Other speakers include songwriting partners, session musicians, record label representatives, and his ex-wife, who describes Reid as "a loner person."

After Blowfly sold the rights to his catalog in 2003, he paid his debts, and bid goodbye to any future royalties. Without Bowker, he'd probably be holed up in a motel, watching television, and filling up on fast food, but this trained-seal act can be hard to watch. Still, there's something to be said for Furmanski's clear-eyed approach when most other music documentaries cling to the rise-fall-and-rise model, though there's no mention of predecessors and protégés, including Redd Foxx, Rudy Ray Moore, Wu-Tang Clan's Ol' Dirty Bastard, and 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell.

If it isn't the raunchy comedy I was expecting, it isn't a full-blown tragedy either. Instead, the aptly-titled Weird World of Blowfly is more like a Dave Chappelle-produced horror movie where the monster lives on and Dr. Frankenstein caters to his every whim until the money runs out.

       Chuck D: "Rap Dirty" was my inspiration when I wrote "Fight the Power."

6/4/25 update: Clarence "Blowfly" Reid passed away in 2016 at 76.

The Weird World of Blowfly continues at SIFF Cinema at the Film Center through Thurs, Dec 1. For more information: (206) 633-7151. 

Images from Rotten Tomatoes (Blowfly in sparkly outfit) and Wikipedia (cover art for Betty Wright's 1972 Alston Records single "Clean Up Woman" and the 1973 Weird World Records album The Weird World of Blow Fly).

A Thriller with Purpose: Norman Jewison's Best Picture Winner In the Heat of the Night

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT 

(Norman Jewison, USA, 1967, 110 minutes) 

“We talk a lot about freedom, but it's a country based on slavery."--Norman Jewison in Lee Grant's 2000 Sidney Poitier profile One Bright Light 

Norman Jewison (1926-2024) knew exactly what he was doing when he made In the Heat of the Night. Concerned about race relations in his adopted country, the Canadian director set out to make a thriller bursting with local flavor, set to a scintillating score, and toplined by experienced actors who generated a crackling chemistry. No speechifying, no sadism. 

The movie has all the tropes of the conventional murder mystery–dead body, colorful suspects, potential coverup–but everything leads back to the way this small-minded Southern town treats a Black detective from the North. 

The film begins in a roadside diner where a beat cop (the great Warren Oates) refuels before making his late-night rounds. Ralph, the counterman (inexperienced actor Anthony James), is a tall, gangly guy who enjoys the more rollicking tunes on the jukebox. Jewison had hoped to include Sam the Sham's menacing "Little Red Riding Hood," but it was too expensive, and to be clear, many things were. The director was no fool, and he knew full well that United Artists wasn't funding his so-called Black Movie as generously as they could have–by 1967, he had already made six major motion pictures.

Fortunately, resourcefulness was among Jewison's finest qualities, and he tasked Oscar-winning composer Quincy Jones with the diegetic songs, like "Bowlegged Polly," that appear in the film, in addition to the country and blues-saturated score. There's no funk here, and nor does there need to be. That would come later.

This sequence sets the tone for the film, and I would imagine some Southerners weren't all that thrilled, because it's filled with sweaty faces and hair-trigger tempers--starting with Officer Wood and Ralph--and even a few flies buzzing around the greasy spoon, which gives off health hazard vibes. 

Granted, I don't believe Jewison was trying to paint all Southerners with the same brush, but the narrative never leaves this backwater Mississippi town. 

On the other hand, he made it in Sparta, Illinois, because Poitier who had had run-ins with the Klan, refused to risk a protracted stay below the Mason-Dixon Line, and during the brief period they filmed in Tennessee--where he slept with a gun under his pillow--they were made to feel most unwelcome. At least they didn't have to paint over the Sparta town signs. 

During his rounds, Wood drives past 16-year-old Delores's house knowing she has a predilection for lounging around without a top--hey, it's hot at night. 

The officer gawks for a bit before going on his way. Haskell Wexler, who would win an Oscar for his expressive work, uses window panes to avoid anything too risqué, but he gets the point across: Wood is a voyeur and Delores is an exhibitionist. 

Though Ralph and Delores come across as "local color," both will factor into the larger storyline, and though Corinne Margolin, aka Quentin Dean, would receive Golden Globe consideration for her destabilizing performance, she would retire from acting only three years later. She was 58 when she died. 

Shortly afterward, Wood finds the body of Chicago industrialist Phillip Colbert lying facedown in an alley, and the plot begins in earnest. He could follow proper police procedure, but nope. He spots an unfamiliar Black man at the train station, and assumes he's looking to get out of dodge after doing the deed. Beyond the overt racism, he fails to note that Sidney Poitier's Virgil Tibbs is professionally dressed, and nothing about his behavior suggests that he just murdered another man. He explains that he was in town to visit his mother, and that he's waiting for the train to take him back to Philadelphia. 

While any dispassionate officer of the law might give him the benefit of the doubt, Wood notices he has a roll of crisp dollar bills in his wallet–unusual for Sparta's Black citizenry–and that he's non-deferential in affect, so Wood clocks him for a defiant, remorseless, murderering thief, and hauls him to the station. 

I won't say too much about the ensuing investigation, not least since Jewison considered the relationship between Tibbs and Rod Steiger's Chief Gillespie of primary importance, and that's what proves most memorable. 

At the station house, Tibbs meets Gillespie, a more intelligent character than the doltish Wood–Oates really is a treat in the role–but one susceptible to the same prejudices. The chief is taken aback when Tibbs explains that he's a cop and flashes his badge, but it only gives him momentary pause, and he locks him up. He'll eventually set him free, only to lock him up again. 

While he's able, Tibbs does what he can to aid the investigation. It's in his best interest, to be sure, but it's also what he was born to do (there's a subtext here that big cities provide more opportunities for murder-solving). Gillespie grudgingly allows it, because the Philly detective is clearly better at his job. Even his knowledge of forensic science puts the coroner to shame. 

It wouldn't be the first time Poitier had to prove himself superior to white characters just to get by, but as both Steiger and Lee Grant, who plays the industrialist's widow, note on the Criterion commentary track, the actor felt the same way in real life. As popular as he was, and as much as he opened doors for other Black performers, he knew that even a minor misstep would reflect on an entire people. It was fundamentally unfair, but hardly a fictional construct. 

Grant, who had been blacklisted for 12 years, was so affected by the pressures Poitier faced that she made a documentary about her friend, One Bright Light, which premiered on PBS's American Masters in 2000. It's no wonder, after the terrible way Hollywood treated her, that she would shift from acting to directing. You can find her film on Max. It's quite moving.

En route to solving the crime, and winning the freedom that always should have been his, Tibbs questions a squirrely Wood, a petulant Delores, Harvey, the young man who swiped Colbert's wallet (In Cold Blood's Scott Wilson), and Mama Caleba, a shopkeeper and abortionist (Beah Richards, an Oscar nominee as Poitier's mother in 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?).

If there's anything about this film that proves especially surprising now, it's the matter-of-fact way Jewison handles abortion. After all, the production code was still in effect–though facing challenges–and Roe v. Wade was five years away. That said, no one terminates a pregnancy. 

When cornered by rednecks in a garage, Tibbs also proves himself handy with a metal pole he finds lying around, wielding it like a samurai sword. It's probably the closest the film comes to full-on fantasy, but I can imagine audiences cheering when he goes to town on those miscreants, though that wasn't the sequence that would make the film instantly infamous. 

There's another in which Tibbs, Gillespie at his side, questions Colbert rival--and cotton plantation owner--Endicott (Larry Gates). It's little surprise when Endicott slaps him, but what shocked audiences in 1967, and surely provoked even more cheering: Tibbs doesn't hesitate to slap him right back. So hard he nearly knocks the guy off his feet and makes his eyes water. 

That was a first. Blaxploitation hadn't happened yet, and even if off-screen Poitier came across as a temperate individual, he had done the damn thing. 

As the civil rights movement, with which Poitier was heavily involved, gathered steam in the 1970s, In the Heat of the Night came to be seen as too tame by more radical observers. It wasn't as pointed or as cynical as the angrier, low-budget films that arrived in its wake, attracting fewer customers, but growing in admiration, like William Wyler's final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, which is also very good, but much less optimistic. 

That perception suggests the film as wish fulfillment writ large, except it really isn't. If Jewison, working from an Oscar-winning screenplay by Naked City and Perry Mason creator Stirling Silliphant, flirts with the mismatched buddy cop formula, Oscar-winning actor Steiger's Gillespie remains an antagonist until the very end, at which point the clouds briefly part, as it were, and Jewison leaves us with the impression that Tibbs just happened to join forces with the one man in Sparta who was redeemable, and even that isn't guaranteed, unless you take the film's long afterlife into consideration. 

Silliphant adapted his screenplay from 1965's In the Heat of the Night, the first of John Ball's seven Virgil Tibbs novels, though he made several changes: Ball set the original story in North Carolina, the victim was a conductor named Enrico Mantoli, and Tibbs hailed from Pasadena. 

As Robert Altman used to say, films don't end, they just have a stopping point. Life goes on. Having put the case to bed, Tibbs will presumably return to Philadelphia, and Gillespie will remain in Sparta. Both single men at the time, they might fall in love, get married, and have kids, though that's less likely in Gillespie's case, because he admits to Tibbs, in an unguarded, booze-fueled moment, that he's a loner. Though the 42-year-old Steiger looks older than Poitier, they were only two years apart in age. 

That said, the movie was such a sensation that it led to two sequels, neither directed by Norman Jewison, and a television series starring Howard Rollins, Jr. and Carroll O'Connor, that ran for eight seasons on NBC and CBS. As you can imagine, Tibbs and Gillespie really did become buddy cops. Tibbs was also presented as a married man with children, while Gillespie has a Black girlfriend he marries in the series finale. The show was set in the 1980s and '90s, and shot on location in Louisiana and Georgia. 

I'm sure all three have their merits, but I've never felt the need to follow Tibbs beyond his entrance into the train heading toward more hospitable territory. Poitier is terrific from beginning to end, but Tibbs doesn't really change. When tested, he proves his mettle, but I can't imagine expecting anything less. Gillespie, on the other hand, gains respect, and possibly even a little affection, for the detective, though that doesn't make them friends. 

Beyond Jewison, Poitier, Steiger, Grant, and Wexler, the creative team included other talents known for their dedication to civil rights, like Quincy Jones, who considered Poitier a friend and called on Ray Charles to sing the theme song, and editor Hal Ashby, who considered Jewison a mentor.

When Jewison dropped out of 1970's gentrification satire The Landlord to direct 1971 musical Fiddler on the Roof, he gave Ashby the chance to direct his first feature–it was the least he could do after Ashby's innovative work on The Cincinnati Kid, The Thomas Crown Affair, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for which he received an Oscar for Best Editing. 

The Landlord also tackles race relations in America–the North in this case–but from a more comedic and sexualized perspective. The writing also came from two Black talents, novelist Kristin Hunter and writer/director/actor Bill Gunn. Times were continuing to change, and Ashby's debut plays like a companion to In the Heat of the Night, the farcical light to its noirish dark. 

All of the principals involved with the latter film, which won five Oscars including Best Picture, would go on to do work of merit for years to come. Just as Lee Grant would turn to directing in the early-1970s, Sidney Poitier would do the same. Now he was the guy literally calling the shots. 

As for Norman Jewison, he made a lot of terrific pictures during his filmmaking career, three of which form a trilogy about race relations in America, exemplifying the fact that this was a lifelong concern: In the Heat of the Night, 1984's A Soldier's Story, starring Rollins, Jr. and a 29-year-old up-and-comer named Denzel Washington, and 1999's Hurricane, his triumphant reunion with Washington–one of the highlights of my filmgoing life was attending the Toronto International Film Festival premiere with Jewison, Washington, and former middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in person. 

The film that launched the trilogy was a success on every level, reportedly making 12 times its cost, and yet Sidney Poitier received no recognition from the Academy. It's an odd oversight, and not necessarily a racist one, but if there was no Poitier, there would have been no film, because no other actor in 1967 could have replaced him. He was singular, unique, groundbreaking, and one of the finest actors this nation ever produced.

In the Heat of the Night is out now on The Criterion Collection in a 4K restoration on Blu-ray + UHD with several archival features, including an interview with Norman Jewison and Poitier biographer Aram Goudsouzian.

Images: Ann Arbor Observer (Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger), The Oklahoman (Warren Oates and Anthony James), the IMDb (Quentin Dean, Poitier with Oates, Poitier with Arthur Malet, Fred Stewart, and Jack Teter, Poitier with Scott Wilson, Lee Grant with Beau Bridges in The Landlord, and Poitier with Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor in Uptown Saturday Night), EyeFilmmuseum (Poitier with Steiger and Larry Gates), and Amazon.

SIFF 2025 Dispatch #8: Cat Town, USA Celebrates a Sanctuary for Cats in Florida

CAT TOWN, USA 

(Jonathan Napolitano, 2025, USA, 73 minutes) 

Terry and Bruce Jenkins, the couple at the center of Jonathan Napolitano's Cat Town, USA have lived a fairly charmed life. They spent their 30s sowing their wild oats, and when they were ready to settle down, they chose a spread in coastal Florida, where Bruce built a miniature western town, complete with water tower, for their kids to play in and around. 

The two started out as dog people, but they had all this land and all these buildings, so they began by adopting a senior cat who was two weeks away from euthanasia, inspiring them to open Cat's Cradle Foundation, a cat sanctuary (after that recollection, they never mention dogs again). Since then, the couple has adopted cats who were abandoned, who didn't get along with other pets, or who were left homeless after their owners died. 

All of their cats are seniors, meaning 11 and older. The oldest, Garfield, is 20. I had hoped my little grey cat, Lola, would live that long, and she came close, but this velvety orange tabby looks like she has plenty of life left.

A highlight is "bag and box day," one among many sanctuary events, when Terry and Bruce bring in cardboard boxes sprinkled with catnip. Napolitano films the cats in slow motion as dreamy music plays on the soundtrack. 

Beyond the cats, the Jenkins have chickens, fish, ferrets, and a miniature horse named Shortcake, who seems to get along just fine with the cats. They no longer have Porkchop, a pig, for reasons Terry explains in the film. 

These are people with good hearts, but there are limits, and they can't take in every senior Pasco County cat who needs a home, so Napolitano shares some of the letters they have received and introduces some of the cats they have taken in. Bruce says they receive one to two requests each day. 

Napolitano also speaks with their volunteer, in addition to others who have benefited from or helped to promote their service, though their kids don't put in any appearances. It would be interesting to hear what they think about the sanctuary, and its unfortunate that neither of them are involved, because it's clear that Terry and Bruce, much like their cats, are slowing down.

Bruce, who serves as the sanctuary's cheerleader, accountant, and IT guy, becomes emotional when he talks about the cats they have lost. By comparison, the pragmatic Terry is stoic, so much so that she's the one who takes cats to the vet to be euthanized when their time comes. Though I've seen Cat Town, USA described as a "feel good" proposition, that's a bit of a stretch. A senior couple who looks after senior cats represents a risk–a risk worth taking, but a risk nonetheless. Things can, and do, go wrong. 

The film ends on a happy note, though the insular nature isn't always to its advantage. 

 

What worked in Suburban Fury works less well here, because it isn't clear what Terry and Bruce did before they retired, and where their money comes from. I'd imagine Cat's Cradle is a non-profit, and that they welcome donations, but I couldn't say for sure. Retirement income may also be a factor. I just know that they do it for love, because it isn't profitable. 

I also don't know what they'll do when they're no longer able to continue. It would be nice to think the sanctuary will continue, but without a succession plan, that seems unlikely. Even if it doesn't, though, it's clear they've done a world of good for dozens, if not hundreds, of Florida cats, and that's no small thing. Not least if the film encourages others to do the same. 

 

After I posted this review, I did some digging. Find out more about Terry and Bruce Jenkins here. I'm happy to report that Garfield was still going at 23. 

 

The last weekend of the festival is packed with some of the most enticing films. My recommendations include Color Book, Familiar Touch, and Sorry, Baby. I wrote about the first two, both great, when I saw them at last year's Cucalorus. Writer/director/actor Eva Victor, who will be in town with Sorry, Baby, has also made a cat film of a kind. The narrative doesn't revolve around cats, but her character, in the wake of a traumatic experience, finds a kitten just when she could use a companion, since her best friend (Naomie Ackie) moved away. I wouldn't say that the kitten changes her life, but it definitely helps.

 

 

Cat Town, USA  plays SIFF Cinema Uptown today, May 24, at 3:30pm. Jonathan Napolitano and producer James Gannon will be in attendance.  

 

Color Book plays the Uptown May 24 at 5:30pm and May 25 at 2:30pm, Familiar Touch  plays Shoreline Community College on May 25, and Sorry, Baby, followed by the closing night party, plays SIFF Cinema Downtown May 24 at 6pm. Cat Town, USA and Color Book will be available to stream May 25 - June 1. Click here to view the SIFF 2019 short, All Cats Go to Heaven, from which Napolitano expanded his feature. All images from the film.

SIFF Dispatch #7: Robinson Devor Profiles Sara Jane Moore, the Would-Be Presidential Assassin Next Door, in Suburban Fury

SUBURBAN FURY 

(Robinson Devor, USA, 2025, 118 minutes) 

"Part of my having a good name on the streets was innocence and stupidity."--Sara Jane Moore on her time as an informant

I'm old enough to remember when Sara Jane Moore tried to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford. I suspect Robinson Devor is, too, but I was so young at the time I forgot all about it almost as soon as it happened. 

Moore didn't seem as colorful as Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, the former Manson Family member who tried the same thing. Both times, Ford emerged unscathed, but Devor's film, written with Bob Fink, Charles Mudede, and Jason Reid, argues that Moore was as colorful. Just not in the same way. 

On September 22, 1975 when she secured her place in history, Moore was a 45-year-old single mother living in San Francisco's Mission District after years in West Virginia and Southern California. Unlike Squeaky or Patricia Hearst, circa the Symbionese Liberation Army, she hadn't been involved in terrorist activities or creepy death cults. During her then-three marriages to men of power and influence, she hobnobbed with famous figures, like Patricia's father, Randolph Hearst. She was a member of the Establishment. 

At Moore's request, Devor didn't interview anyone else for this documentary. Consequently, the director voices FBI Agent Bertram Worthington (a pseudonym), whose words come from Moore's recollections of their conversations. Notably, Patrick Warburton, star of Devor's fine Charles Willeford adaptation, The Woman Chaser, served as an executive producer. I'm not sure whether it was ever an option, but it seems like a missed opportunity not to use his authoritative voice. 

Worthington recruited Moore, because of her connections, which is how she ended up as part of the Hearst inner circle during Patricia's days with the SLA. I'm not certain what she hoped to gain as an informant. A sense of purpose, perhaps? She mentions turning down one particular offer of money, but it's hard to imagine she wasn't receiving regular payment of some kind.

Throughout the film, Moore appears key-lit in isolation, either in the back of a Plymouth Fury overlooking Bernal Heights, through the window of a modernist house, or in the St. Francis Hotel, where Ford was staying on that fateful day. At times, an unseen Devor asks her questions, which brings Errol Morris to mind, though Moore doesn't speak to the camera like the subjects in his films (Devor has cited Morris's Fog of War in interviews). 

He provides historical context through archival footage, presented in the boxy Academy ratio, of radical and conservative organizing in the 1970s. 

Moore was torn between the two sides. The longer she was involved with the FBI, the more disillusioned she became by their tactics. In talking about these tensions, she becomes tense herself, and repeatedly loses her cool with Devor. Is he talking over her, or is she being stroppy? Possibly a little of both, though it's clear she alternately loves and hates revisiting these times.

As the film goes on, Devor reveals more details about her past as a WAC and aspiring actress known as Sara Kahn, Sara Jane Manning, and other names. She contained multitudes, particularly in light of the rather unflattering statements her mother and first husband made about her. 

One of the criticisms leveled against Suburban Fury, since its debut at the New York Film Festival, is that Devor doesn't provide enough information about Moore's background, including her five marriages and four children, three of whom appear to have been taken in by her parents, but she repeatedly insisted to Devor that it wasn't relevant, and wouldn't go into it.

Another criticism is that Devor doesn't indicate whether Moore is lying or not, which is fair, but although it isn't mentioned in the film, he and Bob Fink found no evidence of dishonesty. 

Suburban Fury culminates with Moore's description of the day she tried to assassinate the President of the United States of America. It's probably something she's gone over in her head, and with police and reporters, countless times, and she doesn't get especially worked up about it, though I'm not certain what she hoped to accomplish, other than that she intended to succeed–"I was aiming for a head shot because he was probably wearing body armor"--and expected (and possibly wanted) to be killed on site. 

Even after watching this entire documentary, I remain mystified by Sara Jane Moore. She states that she was glad Ford didn't die, but doesn't seem regretful, in the film, that she tried to take his life, though she has expressed regret in other interviews, blaming her turn to radical politics.

As for Devor, it's hard to tell what he thinks about her, but that isn't the same as lacking a point of view. It's more about providing a voice for a woman who has felt misrepresented, though that's always a tricky proposition with such a contradictory figure. On the other hand, Devor doesn't try to reconcile those contradictions, and the result is probably as close as anyone can get to understanding what it's like to live inside her head. It's an interesting place to visit--but I wouldn't want to live there.

Gerald Ford would live another 31 years, dying at 93 in 2006. One year later, Moore was released from prison. In 1990, she was immortalized, alongside eight other killers and would-be killers--including Squeaky Fromme--in Stephen Sondheim's Assassins. Over the years, she has been played by everyone from Becky Ann Baker to Christine Baranski. Moore turned 95 this year, but in a manner of speaking, she will never die.  

Suburban Fury plays May 23 at the Uptown at 3:30pm. Robinson Devor, Jason Reid, Bob Fink, and co-producer Matt Levinthal will be in attendance. On May 26, SIFF awarded the film the Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize. I'll update with more showtimes as they become available.

Images from The Hollywood Reporter (Sara Jane Moore in the Plymouth Fury), Film at Lincoln Center (Moore in her acting days), Getty Images / Fox News (Moore on Sept 22, 1975), and Variety (Moore from another angle).

SIFF 2025 Dispatch #6: An Irish Girl Grows Up Fast in Claire Frances Byrne's Ready or Not

READY OR NOT

(Claire Frances Byrne, 2024, Ireland, 84 minutes)

Claire Frances Byrne's directorial debut is a potent piece of work rooted in a specific place and time--with all the Irish slang you could hope for--and yet universal to the challenges teenage girls face, especially when it comes to teen boys. Even those who seem least threatening.

Katie (a very good Ruby Conway Dunne, looking for all the world like a tiny Andie MacDowell), a rebellious 13-year old, lives in a Dublin council estate. It's 1998. When her parents gift her with a pink bicycle, she spray paints it black, and never hesitates to talk back to the well meaning, if corny couple (Laurence Kinlan and Charleigh Bailey from Darren Thornton's A Date for Mad Mary, another fine film about a rebellious young Irish woman).

Summer has just begun, and Katie would rather hang out with the impetuous Danni (Molly Byrne), cynical Sarah (Alicia Weafer), and genial Stephen, aka Steo (Alex Grendon). She's known Steo the longest, and he shares her passion for football. He's been her best mate for years, but when his predatory cousin, Byrner (Lewis Brophy), encourages Steo to kiss her, and he does–with her consent–things quickly go further than she expected, leaving both her and Steo feeling confused and uncomfortable. 

 

Katie tells Danni about the encounter and pledges her to secrecy, but their school mates soon finds out, and she's mortified. Katie assumes Steo spilled the beans, and gives him the cold shoulder. Unless I missed it, Lynn Ruane's screenplay never names the culprit, but when Katie describes her estate as a "fishbowl" at the end of the film, she isn't kidding--whether child or adult, everyone is up in everyone else's business. At least Katie has no siblings to complicate matters further.

If she isn't a model citizen, Katie knows she isn't ready for sex or alcohol, even if other kids, like Danni, try to convince her otherwise. One minute, the resident mean girls accuse her of being "fridget," Irish slang for someone scared or uninterested in sex, the next they accuse her of being a slut.

Worse yet, consent means nothing to Byrner, who represents a threat to any woman in his vicinity, but when David (Dane Whyte O'Hara), Byrner's better behaved mate, takes an interest in her, Katie doesn't resist. It's possible she feels she owes him after he gets her and Danni out of a jam, and it doesn't hurt that he looks like Chris Evans, but she isn't ready for what comes next. 

If I wasn't thrilled that the director chose such a generic title, one shared by a popular horror comedy series--starring Andie MacDowell, no less--I can't say Ready or Not isn't fitting, since it sums up the theme of the film. 

 

Katie is hardly an "idjit," as they like to say in Ireland, but nor is she as brave or as worldly as she pretends, and one good looking, smooth talker is all it takes to break down her defenses. (It's no wonder Joyce Chopra titled her devastating 1985 younger woman-older man film Smooth Talk.)

 

So, Katie makes mistakes, suffers the embarrassing (though hardly tragic) consequences, and she'll probably make more, but the film ends with the impression that she and her friends have learned some valuable lessons.

Though I don't usually gravitate towards coming-of-age stories, I wrote about the other two Irish films at the festival, so it only made sense to check out the third, and I'm glad I took a chance on this one, though I regret that it won't be shown with closed captions. You might think Dublin kids would be easy to understand, but I missed a few words. It was also helpful to look up the unfamiliar idioms.

I can't say I wouldn't have expected a narrative feature about a 13-year-old girl in 1998 to remind me of Blue Road, Sinéad O'Shea's profile of Edna O'Brien, except Katie recalls the writer, as a youth, in the ways she looks askance at alcohol, finds herself both attracted to and repelled by men, and longs to be seen as a multi-dimensional human being, rather than strictly as an angel or a whore, as if those were an Irish woman's only two choices.

If things were this bad for Irish girls in the 1990s, I shudder to think what they were like in the 1950s--and can only hope they're better now. 

Ready or Not plays SIFF Cinema Uptown on May 21 at 9:30pm and May 22 at 4pm. Director Claire Frances Byrne is scheduled to attend. Images from the IMDb (Molly Byrne, Alicia Weafer, and Ruby Conway Dunne), Letterboxd (Dunne and Alex Grendon), and United Agents (Dane Whyte O'Hara).

SIFF 2025 Dispatch #5: Josh O’Connor Narrates a Dreamy Portrait of Jean Cocteau

JEAN COCTEAU 

(Lisa Immordino Vreeland, USA, 2024, 94 minutes) 

"I am unquestionably the most obscure and the most celebrated of poets."--Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

British actor Josh O'Connor, who has an especially appealing voice–slightly husky with a certain underlying vulnerability–narrates Lisa Immordino Vreeland's portrait of Jean Cocteau. (At this year's SIFF, O'Connor also stars in Max Walker-Silverman's Rebuilding.)

By reading from his writings, including the letters--believed to be between 900 and 1,000--he wrote to his widowed mother, Eugénie, O'Connor essentially becomes the French artist, poet, playwright, and filmmaker, so it's odd that the Paris-born Vreeland didn't hire a French narrator, but she lives and works in the States, and it's consistent with her profiles of other art/design-oriented subjects, including Cecil Beaton, Peggy Guggenheim, and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland (to whom she's related by marriage).

That said, Vreeland's impressionistic profile, which drifts from project to project, includes archival interviews in French, wordless excerpts from productions of Cocteau's plays and ballets, and present-day images of the places he lived, like an especially enchanting villa in the South of France--fittingly shot by DP Shane Sigler with a Bolex. Cocteau had a lyrical style as an illustrator, and the walls are covered with his distinctive imagery. 

 

Throughout, the director details Cocteau's relationships with Coco Chanel, Sergei Diaghilev (pictured to the right), Édith Piaf, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and other famous figures. He got along with most quite well, with the exception of writer and surrealist leader André Breton, who comes across as a bully. 

 

Beyond Cocteau's considerable talents, the ease with which he befriended so many extraordinary artists certainly elevated his own work. Chanel, for instance, designed costumes for his stage productions and even produced a revival of his 1917 ballet Parade. I'm not certain why Breton targeted him, but his sexual orientation appears to have been a factor. Vreeland also details the controversies that swirled around his sexually fluid and politically ambiguous work at times when the right wing was ascendant in France. 

Because Cocteau didn't initially have ambitions to direct, I find it remarkable that he made such a smooth transition to filmmaking, and I'm especially fond of 1946's La Belle et La Bête, aka Beauty and the Beast, starring his lover and muse Jean Marais, who would appear in four other films. It's the only version of the fairy tale I'll ever need with all its fantastical flights of fancy–all done in camera–unlike the more recent animated, musical, and CGI-saturated versions. (I'm not certain why Vreeland called on O'Connor as narrator, but it may be because he has often played queer characters.) 

 

All told, Vreeland covers most every aspect of Cocteau's life and work, including the Roberto Rossellini and Pedro Almodóvar adaptations of his 1930 play La Voix Humaine. Unless I missed it, though, she overlooks his script work, like his adaptation of his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, for Jean-Pierre Melville's fine 1950 film. 

 

Vreeland also covers the friends and lovers Cocteau lost to illness and war, though he didn't fear death, which may be why his passing, in the context of her film, doesn't feel especially tragic, not least because he abhorred aging.

A mutual has described this profile as too ordinary to suit the director's extraordinary subject. I take her point, but found it quite lovely, and less conventional than that description suggests. Anyone looking for a chronological account may find its drifting quality frustrating, but that felt right to me. Vreeland covers La Belle et la Bête, for instance, before 1932's The Blood of a Poet, since she prioritizes themes or moods over years. 

If Cocteau remains a little enigmatic, I think it's what he would've wanted. 

I would also recommend Constance Tsang's Blue Sun Palace, particularly for admirers of Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-liang. As with Jean Cocteau, it has a certain drifting quality as Tsang focuses first on one Taiwanese migrant in Queens before shifting to two associates, one played by magnetic actor/director Lee Kang-sheng, who has appeared in all 11 of Tsai's features. 

Jean Cocteau plays SIFF Cinema Uptown on May 20 at 3pm. Producer/editor/co-writer John Northrup scheduled to attend. Available online May 26 - June 1. Blue Sun Palace plays Pacific Place on May 24 at 11am, and Rebuilding plays the Uptown on May 24 at 8:30pm and May 25 at 6:30pm. 

 

Images from Gagosian Quarterly (Jean Cocteau, 1929 / Photo © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany), DailyArt Magazine (Photograph of Jean Cocteau and Sergei Diaghilev / Operaplus), and The Cinessential (Jean Marais and Josette Day in La Belle et La Bête).

SIFF 2025 Dispatch #4: Horror, Comedy, and Sisterhood Come Together in The Balconettes

THE BALCONETTES / Les Femmes au Balcon 

(Noémie Merlant, 2024, France, 104 minutes) 

"This isn't cinema verité; this doesn't have the same realism as my previous film. Instead it's a fairytale, a fable. A punk fable, to be sure."--Noémie Merlant to Variety

Céline Sciamma's 2019 Daphne du Maurier-inspired gothic romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire–with the same-sex subtext of du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca made text–gave French actress Noémie Merlant her breakout role, leading to other notable projects, like Todd Field's 2022 Tár with Cate Blanchett, in which she plays the imperious composer's assistant. 

With her second directorial effort The Balconettes, Merlant collaborates with her mentor as co-writer, surely the wisest move she could make in light of Sciamma's efforts in that arena, both for her own films and those of others, like André Téchiné's Being 17 and Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District, in which Merlant appears (Animal Kingdom cowriter Pauline Munier also contributed to the screenplay). Merlant is, in other words, in good company. 

The Balconettes opens on a Marseilles apartment complex on a sweltering summer day. DP Evgenia Alexandrova showcases one colorful balcony after another as retro pop plays on the soundtrack, before introducing a grim scene in which Denise (Nadège Beausson-Diagne), a put-upon Black woman, takes her revenge on her abusive white husband. When he refuses to die, she turns to some rather comic methods to finish the job. Clearly, a film of wide tonal shifts. 

Merlant then turns to the young women at the center of the story. Two are roommates, while the third lives in Paris. Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), who is friendly with Denise, is a self-proclaimed ordinary-looking girl working on a novel about the hot guy across the way, extroverted Ruby (Souheila Yacoub from Dune: Part Two) works as a camgirl, and Merlant's Élise is an actress on a break from her demanding husband, Paul (Christophe Montenez). 

They're distinct types, but the chemistry between the ladies combined with the heightened tone prevents them from feeling too much like stereotypes. 

After a minor automobile mishap involving Élise and the hot guy, photographer Magnani (Emily in Paris hearththrob Lucas Bravo), a group flirtation ensues, kind of like the voyeuristic scenarios in Rear Window and Monsieur Hire, even if the initial tone is screwball. It's mostly fun and games, though Nicole worries Magnani will end up with Ruby or Élise, since they're both more sexually expressive, even if one isn't actually single.  

After a night of partying, one of the three ladies winds up soaked in blood. It isn't clear what happened, though Merlant and Sciamma drop clues that one of them was either victim or attacker, possibly both if self-defense was involved. 

Things soon turn even grislier as the ladies join together, much like the female duo in Henri-Georges Clouzot's influential 1955 thriller Les Diaboliques, to cover up a crime in which they may or may not have been involved, but for which at least one of them would surely be implicated. 

From that point forward, The Balconettes plunges into horror territory, complete with the ghosts of men who've done the trio wrong. I didn't mind the swerves from comedy to darker modes, but the second-time director (2021's Mi Iubita Mon Amour) lets the acting get away from her at times. The scenario, enhanced by moody lighting and Uèle Lamore's mournful score, is already dramatic enough without all the yelling and screaming. 

There's also a lot of extraneous nudity. It fits Ruby's character, but Élise's clothes often slide off her body just for the hell of it--all it takes is a slight breeze--and I'm not sure we needed to see exactly what her gynecologist sees during an exam...though it makes even Paul Verhoeven seem timid.

I like the way the film began, and it held my attention, but lost my sympathies midway through. I'm all for sisterhood, but the men in the film are painted with the broadest of strokes, something I didn't expect from Sciamma, though women battling oppression is a consistent theme for her, one more successfully expressed in 2014's banlieue-set Girlhood. 

I found the The Balconettes diverting, and I look forward to seeing all of these actors again, even Lucas Bravo, who plays the eyeliner-wearing villain of the piece, but it didn't quite work for me, not least when the middle-aged Black woman from the prologue pays for the same kind of crime for which the young white women go free. That might not be completely unrealistic, but the ladies forget all about Denise en route to their empowering ending.

The Balconettes plays SIFF Cinema Uptown on May 18 at 9pm and SIFF Cinema Downtown on May 19 at 3:15pm. Souheila Yacoub, an actress of Tunisian and Swiss descent, next appears in Evil Dead Burn. Images from The Guardian (Yacoub, Sanda Codreanu, and Noémie Merlant / Photograph: Nord-Ouest Films – France 2 Cine’ma), ilylucasbravo (Yacoub, Codreanu, and Lucas Bravo), and mk2 Films (Yacoub, Codreanu, and Merlant).