Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name

Stalkers aren't just for the rich and famous, like in Play Misty for Me or The Bodyguard. In this case a recently paroled woman is stalking working-class Neil and Barbara Curry. It certainly isn’t for their money. It is personal. Yet, the real tragedy is that the original score, composed and performed by blues and jazz singer Alberta Hunter is not more widely available. The cast is pretty notable too in director-screenwriter Alan Rudolph’s 1978 drama Remember My Name, which screens at the Roxy Cinema this week.

Emily is fresh out of prison and looking to cause trouble in general, but particularly for Barbara Curry. It starts with some vandalism, but escalates rapidly. She also lurks outside her husband’s construction site, but his response is a little different. In fact, when confronted by his wife, Curry sounds rather evasive and even a bit ashamed. Definitely something transpired between them, which will somewhat shift audience sympathies as Rudolph teases it out.

Meanwhile, the television news keeps telling its viewers they should care more about an earthquake that rocked Budapest, as Hunter’s bluesy tunes (recorded in a special session produced by John Hammond) swing the soundtrack. It is perhaps fitting that Robert Altman produced Remember My Name, because Rudolph’s approach is often quite Altman-esque. That is another reason why it is so odd this film is so rarely programmed.

It is a bit ironic to see Anthony Perkins cast as a married construction worker, but he perfectly expresses Curry’s guilty squirreliness. As usual, he definitely projects a sense something is not entirely right with him, albeit not to the degree of his iconic roles. He happened to be playing opposite his real-life wife Berry Berenson, who was murdered on September 11^th, aboard American Airline Flight 11. She really is terrific as Barbara, so it is odd she only had a handful of further roles.

On the other hand, Remember My Name is fully stocked with supporting players who would later make names for themselves, including Jeff Goldblum and Alfre Woodard, as Emily’s boss and work-rival at the Woolworth-like retailer. Plus, Tim Thomerson (“Jack Deth”) briefly appears as Neil Curry’s co-worker.

Nevertheless, if this film were better remembered, Emily would probably be known as the role of Geraldine Chaplin’s career. You can definitely see how she might have influenced Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction or Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female. Yet, Chaplin brings a vulnerability to her character that sets Emily apart from just about every other movie-stalker.

Of course, for those of us with good taste in music, the biggest star of Remember is Hunter’s music. Thematically, her songs are totally the blues, but they are all arranged in a swinging up-tempo jazz style, recorded with legendary jazz musicians, like Doc Cheatham on trumpet, Vic Dickenson on trombone, Budd Johnson on tenor, and Connie Kay on drums.

Pretty Poison: Anthony Perkins on Parole

He is one of those crazy environmentalists, with an incarceration record to prove it. Unfortunately, the delusional parolee is about to meet someone far more dangerous than himself: his new Lolita-ish girlfriend. Once again, Anthony Perkins plays a rather highly strung young man in Noel Black’s Pretty Poison (trailer here), which is currently playing in New York at Film Forum.

Dennis Pitt is a squirrely fellow, who has a difficult time distinguishing fantasy and reality. He really did not mean to hurt anyone when he set that fire, so now that Pitt has been deemed mature and responsible, he is to be released. Okay, best of luck with that then. Yes, he has to report to his indulgent parole officer Morton Azenauer, but he takes off anyway at the first chance he gets. Drifting into Winslow, MA, he accepts a job in a chemical plant specializing in spewing day-glo chemicals into the river.

In Pitt’s elaborately constructed fantasy, he is now a CIA agent assigned to shut the plant down. However, the stakes raise precipitously when he enlists the help of high school senior Sue Ann Stepanek. Whether or not she really buys into his delusion, one thing is clear: Stepanek is serious trouble.

Featuring a somewhat groovy and very era appropriate score composed by Johnny Mandel, Poison is sort of a more innocent forerunner of Body Heat. Tuesday Weld makes a legitimately classic femme-fatale as Stepanek, coquettish and manipulative in equal measure. Refraining from the full Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins emphasizes Pitt’s pathos as well as his tickiness. Frankly, viewers will feel for him, despite his ever compounding mistakes.

Although Black would work extensively in television following Poison, he still helmed the occasional feature, including the mildly naughty Phoebe Cates favorite, Private School. It is strange more pseudo-noirs did not come his way, because he handles the somewhat risqué elements of Poison with an effectively light touch. There is a constant sense of the danger and wrongness of Pitt’s relationship with Stepanek, but it never becomes lurid or smarmy.

Though remade as a workaday Fox TV movie, for some odd reason the original Poison has not caught on beyond its cultish critical following. Indeed, it has most of the elements working in concert. Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr.’s adaptation of Stephen Geller’s novel revels in the deviousness of the twists, rather than milking them for surprise value, while Perkins and Weld do their things. It is quite an enjoyably cunning little film, definitely worth re/discovering while it screens at Film Forum through this Thursday (2/9) with a new 35mm print.