OVP: An American Dream (1966)

Film: An American Dream (1966)

Stars: Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Eleanor Parker, Barry Sullivan, Murray Hamilton, Joe De Santis

Director: Robert Gist

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"A Time for Love")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I watch two channels in my house with such constant abandon they might as well be my roommates: Food Network & TCM.  The latter I know every host, and I know what kinds of films they will like (and what they will & won't say about movies).  Ben Mankiewicz is the biggest name on the channel since Robert Osborne's passing, and while Mankiewicz will never be Osborne (no one will), he has his own charms & I've grown fond of him.  I also can tell when he's introducing a movie that he doesn't like (Osborne this was much harder to deduce), but I've never seen Mankiewicz introduce a movie quite like An American Dream (based on the novel by Norman Mailer) recently, where he essentially called it trippy and quoted a truly terrible review of the film...essentially daring the audience to hate watch what they were about to see.  Doing this at the beginning of the movie is something TCM simply doesn't do, and honestly, I was shocked...but proving their marketing department is onto something, was intrigued enough to stick around.  As a result, I got to see one of the weirdest, straight-up messed up movies I have seen in a long time-a film that fails at both camp & competence, and takes three Oscar nominees on the rides of their careers.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Stephen Rojack (Whitman) who is a TV commentator and former war hero who is married to Deborah (Parker), a drug-addled alcoholic who he likely married for her money, and who won't grant him a divorce even though their marriage is hell.  During a fight, Rojack throws her out a 30-story window to her death.  He claims it was a suicide, and without more proof, the police have nowhere to go, but they do make a point of introducing Rojack to a mobster named Ganucci (De Santis) whom he's badmouthing on TV and he meets Cherry McMahon (Leigh) a nightclub singer & a former flame of Rojack's.  This results in Rojack being hunted down by the mob, trying to stop his television campaign for justice, while he & Cherry rekindle their love.  The film ends with Cherry inexplicably double-crossing Rojack (right after he's gotten away with the murder of his wife as they have no evidence), and as a result he dies, gunned down by the mob as the credits roll.

The film is a mess.  The first fifteen minutes you almost get the sense that it might be a really campy, fun mess, as Eleanor Parker is bonkers as a strung-out, drunk heiress, never more than ten feet away from her bed, and in differing stages of undress.  You almost feel like you're watching a horror film the way she torments Stuart Whitman.  But after she dies, the movie becomes sporadic in a dull way, if that makes sense.  Whitman's character's motives are never clear (some scenes he is begging to confess, others he is trying to cover his tracks), and the treatment of Janet Leigh's character is totally sporadic as well.  Leigh is clearly meant to be a prostitute, but (as written by men) that's meant to mean that she doesn't have any morals, which is why she betrays the man she seems to love in the end.

The film was nominated for one Academy Award, for Best Original Song.  While the song is in the middle of the movie (not an end credits scene), it has little to do with the film.  Leigh lip syncs to it in her nightclub, and it stretches forever, but it's not memorable or catchy, and while the team of Mandel & Webber had just won the year before for The Sandpiper (that's likely why they were so soon on the Academy's radar, even for this stinker), the song itself is a snore & doesn't even have the manic energy of the actual catastrophe of a movie.