Arthur Hiller’sPromise Her Anything, now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, embodies the sexual neuroses of the major Hollywood studios in the allegedly Swinging Sixties. With its leering title, it comes on like a saucy treat starring Warren Beatty and Leslie Caron, who were in the middle of their own tabloid scandal. If you paid your ticket to the theatre, you ended up watching squeaky-clean, Disney-esque slapstick centered on the antics of an infant.
In other words,Promise Her Anythingis a prime example of what I call the American No-Sex Comedy, on which I wrote a scintillating article in the September 2020 issue of Retro Cinema; hope you didn’t miss it. The subgenre is my term for those toothless Technicolor gems in which everyone talks about having sex, threatens to have sex, and accuses each other of having sex, and nobody ever has it.
One character inPromise Her Anything, a psychologist who analyzes the development of babies, could easily be talking about the baby steps that the major studios were trying and largely failing to make in this era. The Production Code maintained a ghostly grip on the minds of filmmakers even as the Code was in the process of crumbling like a dike without a finger in it.
Incredibly and instructively, the pre-credit sequence ofPromise Her Anythingprovides a meta-discourse on the topic. We begin with three women pretending to play guitars against gaudy backdrops. As they spin, they seem to be topless. Then they reveal their attire as backless bathing suits in American stars and stripes. Their titillational modesty is almost literally wrapped in the flag.
This display hasn’t been the opening credits ofPromise Her Anything, which are still to come. It’s a film within the film, shot in the Greenwich Village apartment of aspiring filmmaker Harley Rummell (Beatty) as one of the spicy mail-order 8mm movies produced on the side by pet shop owner Angelo Carelli (Keenan Wynn). Barking his displeasure, Carelli storms out of the room, pursued by Rummell, and they argue down the diagonal maze of stairs out into the multicultural street.
“Sex never changes,” says Rummell, to which Carelli responds with brilliant accuracy, “Only in America. In Denmark, it changes.” In the street of bustlinghoi polloi, he continues: “Today if a guy wants to see two broads in bikinis, he don’t need no mail-order movie. He just goes down to the corner supermarket. If he wants real kicks, he goes to an eye-talian movie.”
“I will not shoot a nudie film,” declares Rummell, asserting his peculiarly American artistic integrity tinged with moral rectitude, or else legal timidity. We hear that Rummell learned filmmaking in the army under Carelli, which makes Rummell almost a stand-in for indie iconoclast Russ Meyer. The difference is that Meyer had gleefully been throwing nudies into the faces of the audience and the Supreme Court since the 1950s. While Rummell refused to do nudies in 1966, Meyer graced America withMondo Topless, and not just by mail order. Rummell seems to be asserting his right to obsolescence in his chosen field.
Carelli asserts that Rummell needs a gimmick that may disappoint his paying customers but not so much that they won’t remain paying customers. Here, he’s reaching for a duplicitous formula that describes the bind of the mainstream Hollywood studios. Still formally tied to the decaying Code, they couldn’t release brazen indies like Meyer, so they applied their glossy production values to pretend sex. Thus, the No-Sex Comedy.
No-Sex Comedies’ Obsession with Sex
At this point in my little discourse, some of you are thinking, “What? How about the James Bond movies? How about Tony Richardson’sTom Jonesin 1963, which won Best Picture? How about Clive Donner’sWhat’s New Pussycatin 1965?” You see, Dear Readers, those are predominantly British productions distributed by United Artists, not one of the major studios that funded the Code. UA always had leeway, and it was cleaning up with it now. The traditional studios looked on in envy and scrambled to compete. All this contributed to the replacement of the Code with the MPAA ratings in 1968.
The ratings came after a genuine groundbreaker whose plot pivoted on its characters actually having sex:The Graduate(1967), written by Buck Henry and directed by Mike Nichols. You’d assume Hollywood would never be the same after such a milestone (if not millstone), but the new sexual adventurousness barely lasted through the Seventies. Even allegedly adult comedies, such as Paul Mazursky’sBob & Carol & Ted & Alice(1969) and Alan Ball and Sam Mendes’American Beauty(1999), are only talky No-Sex in disguise. In Hollywood’s eternal battle between the puritan and the prurient, the puritan still holds the whip. Oh, baby.
We were supposed to be discussingPromise Her Anything,so let’s get cracking. Caron plays Michele, a French-accented widow with a two-year-old boy named John Thomas (Michael Bradley), and we’ll not investigate that nomenclature because virtually all English boys’ names are euphemisms anyway. Michele works for Dr. Philip Brock (Bob Cummings, of the sex-starved sitcomLove That Bob), a child psychologist she calls “the sixth most legible bachelor in New York.” She’s full of malapropisms.
He claims to be sick of being surrounded by babies, so she pretends she doesn’t have one as she sets her cap for him dishonestly.
As her babysitter, Rummell takes a liking to the tyke and begins filming him for wacky inserts in his non-nudies as cute comedic value. That’s his idea of a gimmick to please the purchasers of dirty movies, apparently to distract them from not getting their money’s worth, and it sounds like the ultimate bait-and-switch. Then again, that’s whatPromise Her Anythingis doing, and we’d been warned. Promise everything, deliver anything but.
There’s a lot of foolish running around and hiding in closets and on balconies whenever anyone knocks on a door. There’s Rummell frankly putting the moves on Michele, plying her with champagne and saying that marriage is unnecessary for intimacy nowadays, before the kid’s mood-killing antics interrupt all proceedings. There’s that cinematic trope of footage supposedly taken by a stable, unblinking camera (in the doc’s office) that manages to edit multiple angles.
The nonsense culminates in a typical climax of slapstick-as-displacement in which Rummell’s libidinal impulses are expelled by acrobatic body-twisting between balcony and out-of-control cherry-picker. The vehicle’s continual accordion-like elevations and contractions throughout the running time ofPromise Her Anythingare surely symbolic of something. Marriage occurs literally in the last minute so that Rummell can deliver the closing line: “It’s okay now, John Thomas, we’re married.” He might be speaking directly to the censor, as when he broke the fourth wall in an early scene, responding to the kid’s “Dada” by turning to the camera and saying, “I deny everything and demand proof.”
What’s the Point of Non-Alcoholic Cocktails Such as This?
Why does such a movie exist? Well, in the specific case ofPromise Her Anything, this lick and promise was shot in England (and set in New York) during Caron’s highly publicized divorce from English stage director Peter Hall, who charged her with adultery and named Beatty as co-respondent.In other words, this film was a place-filler and publicity stunt in the careers of Caron and Beatty.According to the Blu-ray’s commentary by film historian Dwayne Epstein, they’d been carrying on since 1961 until Caron finally dumped Beatty in the aftermath of her child custody battle with Hall.
The script ofPromise Her Anythingis by William Peter Blatty, who was doing lots of comedy prior to his bestselling 1971 novelThe Exorcistand its subsequent film franchise; his dialogue includes an in-joke reference to his previous novel and screenplay John Goldfarb Please Come Home. Director Hiller has had a diverse, prolific career of box-office ups and downs, the ups includingLove Story(1970) andSilver Streak(1976). As he’d done more successfully onWhat’s New Pussycat, Tom Jones belts out a title song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
The supporting cast ofPromise Her Anythingincludes Hermione Gingold, who’d co-starred with Caron in Vincente Minnelli’sGigi(1958), as the put-upon landlady. Gravel-voiced Lionel Stander plays the workman with the cherry-picker. Cathleen Nesbitt plays the doc’s weary, sarcastic mom, who shocks him by declaring she might have been a stripper; that’s the anti-arousing par for these No-Sex Comedies.
Asa Maynor plays Rummell’s frequent model, who mostly leaves it all on. Tall, dapper Ferdy Mayne saves the day as Italian director and deus ex cinema Vittorio Fettucini, who rescues Rummell’s career. One of my favorite actress names, Anita Sharp-Bolster, drops by as the aged babysitter.Look fast for Jo Anne Worley and Donald Sutherland as the doc’s admirers. The beatnik Heathcliff is played by none other than Charles Chaplin’s son, Michael Chaplin.
To put it bluntly,Promise Her Anythingis the kind of No-Sex comedy prepared to deliver anything except what’s promised by the premise and the winking ad campaign. I can’t even explain why I’m drawn to such non-alcoholic cocktails, except that they warped my cinematic childhood with their glamorous faux-sophistication. Paramount’s new HD master looks and sounds swell on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray. By now, you have no excuse not to know what you’re getting into. Or what you’re not getting into.