MOVIE OF THE DAY: "AN AMERICAN DREAM" (1966)

One of the more tiresome cliches in literature and movies is to slap "American" in the title as if you're making some kind of statement. American Psycho, American Hustle, American Sniper, American Fetish, American Crime...

But perhaps there's something to it. It would be well nigh impossible to take seriously a movie titled Canadian Fetish. And the British Crime would be a young man and his wife leaving the confines of his family, rather than about his his creepy uncle. 

Yup, using American as the primary adjective is a way of saying We've got something seriously important to say about our way of life! Unlike many forms of entertainment, you're playing to the intellectuals rather than the cheap seats -- particularly when the title is An American Dream. And really particularly when it's based on a novel by Norman Mailer.

Norman Mailer's wet American dream.

What is this American dream exactly? The usual: a successful talk show host named Steven Rojack is married to Deborah Kelly -- the daughter of the eighth-richest man in the world, who gifted her with a penthouse apartment in (where else?) Los Angeles. 

But this being the American dream, Rojack is unhappy, because his wife is a nasty, adulterous drunk -- and he's suspected of murder by pushing her off their 66th-floor patio. But he only let her fall. Come now, is that really murder?

Today, the cops would work Rojack over for smoking in the station house.

The cops aren't feeling any sympathy to the newly-widowed Rojack, since he's on his show night after night claiming L.A.'s finest are on the take in order to protect Mafia hitman "Uncle" Gannuci. The Mafia, too, has a bone to pick with Rojack, and not just because of his anti-crime big mouth. Gannuci has been drawn into Deborah's death by accidentally driving over her body just as it hit the ground. Talk about wrong time, wrong place!

Rojack definitely has a thing for putting his hands on
women's throats.

Deborah's father Barney Kelly (Lloyd Nolan, a dead-ringer for Roger Stone in his grey homburg) starts sniffing around as well, determined to disprove Rojack's claim that she committed suicide. Not so much for justice, but her soul. As the local monsignor reminds Barney, if Deborah really did perform the ultimate base jump, her ticket to heaven is permanently rescinded. Details, details.

To recap: the cops, Mafia, and God are out to get the goods on Rojack. Surely a guy in that position needs a little love right? And so it appears in the form of an old flame, Cherry McMahon, whom he dumped a decade earlier in favor of one of the richest women in the world. Like you wouldn't have.

I would say Club Penguin is a stupid name,
but I'd be found in cement shoes at the bottom of a river.

Cherry is a lounge singer currently in the employ of the Mafia -- which, as you can probably guess, doesn't take much of a shine to her old boyfriend. As Cherry rekindles her romance with Rojack, pressure is put on her to turn him over for some underworld justice. 

Police, God, or Mafia: who do you think has the juice to finally give Rojack what's coming to him?

All of the elements that would have made An American Dream a great '50s film noir --  weird plot twists, cynical characters, clever dialogue -- here are overcooked at 800 degrees for 103 minutes. Like most dreams American or not, this is where realism has no place and logic is merely a word in a misplaced dictionary. Here's Cherry bitterly reminding Rojack of their doomed, long-ago affair:

"Would you shut up for five minutes?!"

I never thought it would be deathless, but I thought it would leave a trace. Even the dinosaurs left a footprint. Las Vegas: December 1955, including Christmas and New Year's and the first three weeks of January 1956. Cherry McMahon. For the record book, in case you ever wonder what happened to us some sleepless night, I was almost the mother of your child. At one point, I was three months pregnant. However, as those things usually go, on the advice of an older woman it came to nothing.

I thought I'd throw in this shot
of Susan Denberg as Deborah's
sexy maid, because why not?

I have no idea how anyone can recite this kind of dross from memory, especially with a straight face. In fact, one can easily envision the actors falling over with laughter every time the director shouted "Cut!" 


Despite its occasional "daring" language, backal (as opposed to frontal) nudity, and violence (the physical altercation between Rojack and his wife is fairly disturbing), An American Dream has the vibe of a TV production. The lighting is flat, and the direction uninspired, making it look more like a cheap Universal production rather than the Warner Brothers picture that it is. Appropriately, the three leads -- Stuart Whitman (Rojack), Janet Leigh (Cherry), and Eleanor Parker (Deborah) -- were by now transitioning to television, as a younger generation of actors were ready to take over the movie screens.

You'd be nasty, too, if you had gone from
starring opposite Errol Flynn
to Stuart Whitman.

Of all the actors in An American Dream, Eleanor Parker is probably the most interesting to watch, seeing that her career went back to the more innocent movie days of 1942. Although, putting it into perspective, that would be like 1996 today. Not so long ago, eh?

Appearing here as a repugnant, emasculating boozer, Parker starts slurring her dialogue at 75 mph before finally hitting her stride at 150 and beyond. Having just appeared as the prim The Baroness in The Sound of Music, Parker probably had a ball snarling her way through her scenes before taking a swan dive at the end of the second reel.

And starring Janet Leigh as Jamie Lee Curtis!

Probably the best thing about An American Dream is the plethora of of '60s character actors, whose faces are familiar even if you don't know their names -- except for that of George Takei, in his very brief appearance (sans dialogue) as a lawyer. The same year as An American Dream's release, Takei would take off into screen immortality in Star Trek. Good timing, George!

The British distributor made it part of an
appropriate double-feature.

Warner's lurid, misleading promotion for An American Dream did nothing to sell tickets, nor did a title change to See You in Hell, Darling. Today, it stands as an example of the new "adult" freedom movies were experiencing at the time. That is, if you consider actors dropping words like "bastard" and "whore" in the manner of naughty fifth-graders to be adult. At least Canadian Fetish would suppose to be funny... wouldn't it?