WUSA (1970)

User Rating:

5.2/10   

Director:

Stuart Rosenberg

Writers:

Robert Stone (novel)
Robert Stone (screenplay)

Release Date:

12 March 1971 (Sweden)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

Love it or leave it

Plot:

A radio station in the Deep South becomes the focal point of a right-wing conspiracy.

Plot Keywords:

Radio Station | Drifter | Assassination Attempt | New Orleans Louisiana | Social Worker

Cast

Paul Newman	...	Rheinhardt
Joanne Woodward	...	Geraldine
Anthony Perkins	...	Rainey
Laurence Harvey	...	Farley
Pat Hingle	...	Bingamon
Cloris Leachman	...	Philomene
Michael Anderson Jr.	...	Marvin
Jesse Vint	...	Young Doctor
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Kristin Andersen	...	Playboy Bunny
Susan Batson	...	Teenaged Girl
Hal Baylor	...	Shorty
Lucille Benson	...	Matron
Jim Boles	...	Hot Dog Vendor
Bruce Cabot	...	King Wolyoe
Jerry Catron	...	Sidewinder Bates
Zara Cully	...	White-Haired Woman
Geoffrey Edwards	...	Irving
Leigh French	...	Girl
Don Gordon	...	Bogdanovich
Moses Gunn	...	Clotho
Paul Hampton	...	Rusty Fargo
David Huddleston	...	Heavy Man
Clifton James	...	Speed
Diane Ladd	...	Barmaid at Railroad Station
B.J. Mason	...	Roosevelt Berry
Robert Quarry	...	Noonan
Wayne Rogers	...	Calvin Minter
Laird Stuart	...	Bobby
Geraldine West	...	Matron
Gwen Wong
Skip Young	...	Jimmy Snipe

Also Known As:

Hall of Mirrors (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

115 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

UK:AA | Sweden:15 | USA:GP

Filming Locations:

Louisiana, USA

Company:

Paramount Pictures

Trivia:

The famed Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans appears in the film. Preservation Hall on St. Peter Street has been a venue for New Orleans jazz since 1961.

Quotes:

Rheinhardt: Americans - remember no matter what anyone says... we're OK! Only in America can a people say, "We're OK!" Now I want you to say that with me. "We're OK!" Say it with me. "We're OK!" Don't whisper it! Say it loud! "We're OK!" I want to feel it! "We're OK!"
[with comic irony]
Rheinhardt: Terrific!

Soundtrack:

Glory Road

A case of potential untapped, but good to see something on this...

Whilst I would make it clear that I enjoyed much of this film, I would make it equally clear that I found a fair amount of it ill-developed and tediously clunky.

It is a ripe political melodrama, clearly borne out of passions and disappointments which arose from the particular year of 1968 and lingered long into the 1970s. I don't think I could make much argument with the previous commentator's view that the film is made from a certain left-liberal point of view. But a moderate left-liberal stance, and tacitly so. Despite saying that, Anthony Perkins' character - an embodiment in many ways of the "liberal" stereotype - is not made particularly sympathetic. Well-meaning, obsessive, anguished and humourless, I would agree with the Time Out reviewer that it was astute - if unimaginative - casting. Perkins comes across as if his Norman Bates persona has been relocated to late-sixties urban America and forcibly invested with a political conscience.

Paul Newman, who shares perhaps too few scenes with his nemesis Perkins, is also rather good, as the wanderer with a certain cocksure touch, who easily becomes an on-air "communicator" for this WUSA radio station - which is involved in fraudulent dealings and far-right preachings. Newman is every inch the tabloid professional; he is able to claim that he has no agenda and is 'just doing a job'. His political views are ambiguous; his final speech indeed suggesting he has no real belief in the "new right". It difficult to precisely gauge what makes the character tick, besides an vague cynicism; he is as flawed and formidable as Perkins, but diametrically opposite, with his rejection of abstract morality: his behaviour set on a course of mere self-aid. He proves to be the adept survivor, in contrast to genuine ideologues of left or right, but he has no moderation instinct, and turns out somewhat troubled, baffled even, at the film's appropriately frazzled conclusion.

Then there is Joanne Woodward; first film I have seen her in, and one of I gather, many, with Newman. Her character is a trifle ineffectual, present, as if a chess piece, to engage the elusive Reinhardt's desires for a period, and to provide a more 'ordinary' site of audience identification, who does not have right or left-wing politics, and does have more endearing traits: at least compared with Reinhardt. Woodward is quite memorable, cutting a wilting, waning figure as this unfortunate woman, herself much as transitory as Newman at the film's beginning. If she convinces as a 'realistic' character, it is albeit as one implicitly used to condemn the excesses of the New Right and the confrontational politics of the time. Her sickly teariness near the close, and the fact of her being the only person in the riotous hall to listen to Newman's absurdest "we're o.k.!" irony, suggests an idealised 'ordinary person' wrapped up in harmful political events. This is all rather undignified and melodramatic to stand for one who is expected to take this overwrought stuff seriously, and merely serves to draw out some of Reinhardt's humanity for the ending.

Newman does invest Reinhardt with a portion of his customary charm, but this is largely and effectively shown to be a front. Woodward is taken in, like the general audience as it were, by this superficial charm, and she ends up broken both by Newman's inconsistent, careless attitude and by the rupturing of the society depicted.

The film does not go far enough with many of its themes, and I did expect rather more in the dramatic and comic departments - if melodrama is going to work it needs either grand force or a bathetic line in absurdity. The whole lacks humour: born of a self-consciously 'serious' grounding in the subjectivity of U.S. politics in the late-sixties era. On this point, note that Laurence Harvey is vastly under-used; and he of that deeply substantial and bizarre masterpiece of a political thriller, "The Manchurian Candidate"... And additionally, we never see enough of Newman's dealings and relationships with his Rightist colleagues - similarly to how we never see Perkins in the broader context of Left politics. Loose ends were certainly left untied as regards Perkins' character.

I did on the whole quite enjoy this, but it was not a particularly entertaining film: variable in its plotting, dialogue and tone. A case of potential untapped? Undoubtedly. But it is worth paying close attention to those central performances, and it is at least part of its era's Hollywood; markedly less 'safe' and conformist then than now.