From El Dorado to Lost Horizons by Ken Windrum;

Author:Ken Windrum;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Your Parents’ (Self-Conscious) Naughty Sex Comedy

In 1972, as the period was ending, the Neil Simon adaptation The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (Gene Saks) and Billy Wilder’s Avanti! eschewed the partial revivification and revisionism of the subgenre provided by I Love My Wife and Marriage of a Young Stockbroker. Instead, they reverted to portraying middle-aged characters. The resigned tone characteristic of earlier entries like How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life) returns but in a bittersweet, less depressed key, while the institution of marriage is basically preserved. These autumnal narratives also suggest that the mode’s self-conscious, final phase has arrived. Infidelity and promiscuity are viewed as commonplace, well-known activities, associated with youth culture and hipness. Simon and Wilder portray would-be swingers who have read about the sexual revolution and wish to participate. These films treat society’s new-found permissiveness as a topic of discourse or fad rather than the spontaneous result of unhappy marriages, and self-reflexively present characters that discuss and attempt adultery, just as the mobsters on The Sopranos can quote from The Godfather movies and know the gangster film is an established Hollywood genre.

The Last of the Red Hot Lovers follows a middle-aged, Jewish businessman trying to be au courant, which mirrors the situation of a deeply conventional playwright like Simon tackling a racier topic than usual. One tries out adultery, the other writes a farce about infidelity. Ironically, the fading naughty-sex-comedy mode only apes hipness, and thus Simon jumps on a square bandwagon. Befitting its ultimate conservatism, the film also upholds monogamy with, unlike earlier titles, only a bittersweet resignation as Barney, happily married, is not really interested in sex but had hoped a meaningful experience might ameliorate his midlife crisis. The character’s belief in “decency” prevails.

The narrative’s protagonist and spokesman, Barney Cashman (Alan Arkin), is only a restaurateur, not a Broadway fixture, but still financially successful, as suggested by his surname. The Last of the Red Hot Lovers starts with a subjective shot from this character’s point of view as he rises in the morning. His wife is only a shape next to him and never shown throughout the film, and is therefore easily idealized. He notes that her skin looks great for a woman of forty-three, which avoids the misogynist representation of Jody’s body in I Love My Wife. He narrates these thoughts in interior monologue and the viewer is simply privy to his mental states, but not addressed directly as in The Secret Life of an American Wife, which also begins with the protagonist waking before his spouse and ruminating on infidelity and dissatisfaction. The credit sequences then show images, imitating magazine advertisements, of cavorting, sporty young people, such as a pretty girl kissing a race-car driver, accompanied by Neal Hefti’s lounge jazz score. As he drives to work, stuck like Richard Burroughs in rush-hour traffic, Barney muses that beautiful blondes are suddenly ubiquitous, whereas when he was a teenager there were ostensibly only six attractive women in the world.

His main reason

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