The Other Side of Midnight (Charles Jarrott, 1977)

You know what film is better than Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)? The Other Side of Midnight! I make the comparison only because according to Wikipedia, Fox worried that the budget-busting Star Wars would flop whereas they assumed Midnight, based on Sidney Sheldon's 1973 blockbuster novel, would soar on to box-office glory. Midnight performed better than history remembers but nowhere near as well as the Lucas/Diznee franchise that refuses to die (to be fair, though, Sheldon fed his franchise jones by writing a sequel called Memories of Midnight in 1990). And today, it's largely forgotten when not being dismissed as trash. But as a portrait of the straitjackets placed on women by patriarchal capitalism, it stings like Valley of the Dolls*, if not Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995).

One might expect a slog given Jarrott's sterile filmography including the disastrous 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon. Instead, its 165 minutes become increasingly agitated and desperate, connecting the fates of two women, Noelle (Marie-France Pisier) and Catherine (Susan Sarandon), to one good-for-little hunk, Larry (John Beck), who winds up ruining both their lives. Noelle uses her body to get ahead, Catherine her smarts but both wind up dogged by Larry who cannot keep his cock in one continent (moral: don't ghost!). Catherine's devolution into alcoholism is unconvincing even in terms of raw screen time (we barely see her with a drink), leading to the conclusion that the creators could not imagine a fate for women beyond being wed, dead, or sequestered in a nunnery. But maybe that's just the filmmakers' way of being honest. To imagine otherwise might open up the film to empty fantasy. Andrew Britton, one of the few (only?) critics to take the film seriously, comes to a similar conclusion at the end of a brilliant 1981 review (available in The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton):

"The dramatization of the oppression of women, as is so often the case in even the most distinguished melodramas, builds in the impossibility of the struggle against it, so that patriarchal relations seem at once intolerable and mysteriously impermeable and women are compelled to assume the role of 'victim.' This clearly limits the film’s achievement, but it doesn’t outweigh or invalidate its substantial insights, or diminish one’s gratitude for it at a moment when Urban Cowboy (1980), Honeysuckle Rose (1980), and the rest are setting the tone for a systematic antifeminist reaction" (284).

Britton died of complications from AIDS in 1994. But given the above insights, I have full confidence that he would have recognized Showgirls for the masterpiece that it is.

Grade: A-minus

*the novel, not the dull 1967 film although Midnight may loosen me up to its charms on a rewatch