The Love Machine (1971) Failed 1940's movie starlet turned thrashmeister best-selling authoress Jacqueline Susann struck gold with her surefire formula for publishing sucesss.....combine 4rth Grade level wriing with steamy soap opera melodramatics for publishing success, populated with thinly disguised fictional versions of real notorious celebrities.
Smelling money in the air. studios would wildly overbid for the movie rights to her books......and then convert them into embarrassingly awful films, flat, tepid adaptations that only served to highlight the low grade mediocrity of Susann's clumsy plotting, primitive prose and ripped-from-the-headlines cardboard characters.
Some major stars sucked into these laughable bombs would glumly slouch through them as if the studio was holding their children hostage as leverage. But others, getting into the campy, trashy spirit of the books, delivered over the top, scenery chewing performances that are still cherished by lovers of bad movies and often duplicated by drag queens.
"The Love Machine" supposedly drew upon the life of the much feared and loathed TV and Movie mogul James T. Aubrey (a.k.a."The smiling cobra") As the ruthless programming head of CBS, he clogged the network's schedule with country cornpone hits like "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres" Even more infamously, he ran MGM for a few years, selling off its soundstages,, shredding films in the editing room, and pumping out low budget junk movies in a take-no-prisoners effort to put the crumbling studio back in profit. Which in fact, he did, but left MGM drastically reduced in size and stature.
Susann's make believe Aubrey becomes local New York City anchorman Robin Stone, brought to life, if that's the right word, by the thin tall human mannequin John Philip Law ('Barbarella", "Danger Diobolik")
Law, who spent his entire film career in search of a second facial expression, strides robotically through the film like an animatronic male model who stumbled off the runway. He's a ruthless, love 'em and leave'em bastard who's out to climb to the peak of the mass media mountaintop.
In no time at all, to the disgust and hatred of his rivals and discarded women, he's running an entire TV network, making an unlikely star out of a braying, obnoxious Las Vegas comedian (played by the equally braying, obnoxious Las Vegas comic Shecky Greene)
The closest thing this monotone prick has to a friend is a flamboyant gay fashion photographer (played with sly campy brio by David Hemmings, the only actor here having some fun.) Hemming's got the hots for Law, but he's far too busy boinking the sardonic wife (Dyan Cannon) of the network President (Robert Ryan, picking up a quick easy paycheck)
In addition to his general heartlessness, Law also favors slapping around women when the mood strikes him and you know it won't be long before his many enemies conspire to take him down.
I'll not torture myself nor you beloved BQ visitors with the details, but all these plot machinations somehow lead to the one and only scene that lifts the movie into the guilty pleasure delirium we all hoped for......the sight of Dyan Cannon and Law engaging in a crazy tag team battle with Hemmings and his latest movie star gay lover. (the not so subtle homophobia running throughout the movie comes to full fruition here) If only the rest of the film could have reached such ludicrous heights
But "The Love Machine"s director Jack Haley Jr.,who worked primarily as a producer of documentaries and awards shows, never helmed a feature film and that's painfully evident in every frame. The entire film plays like a listless dress rehearsal, with actors delivering their lines like they're working from cue cards.
The movie concludes with Law, presumably disgraced from that quadruple hetero vs. gay clash of the titans, wandering the streets in search of his next gig (running MGM?) while Dionne Warwicke warbles a song literally devoted to him by name.
Our strong advice......don't even approach this movie, thinking it's a night of unintentional yocks.....no fun to be had here. Leave 'The Love Machine' where it belongs.....lonely and unloved.
Zero stars (0). Consider that rating a kindness.
No comments:
Post a Comment