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Some movies are self-reviewing.
Here is the blurb from the DVD box:
"Meet Suzanne ... pure, sweet and so very
innocent.
Three men are unavoidably drawn to her:
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There's the tormented artist, driven to
capture her angelic beauty on canvas.
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And a right-wing columnist who is captivated
by her "flower child" radical life-style.
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Plus an offbeat filmmaker who is convinced
that the pristine Suzanne is the Messiah. In his bizarre
film-within-a-film, the crucifixion becomes a frighteningly real
crucifixation. The film crew's accountant tries to keep the
movie's final scenes from being shot. Can he succeed ... or will
it be too late?"
I didn't make up that "crucifixation" part.
It really says that. Let me add that the entire film was based on a
song, Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," a famous hippie anthem which drones
on and on throughout the film.
You'll notice that I omitted the film's date from the top of the
page. You get to guess the era:
a. 1946-1959
b. 1960-1966
c. 1967-1974
c. 1982-1993
e. 1994-1999
f. 2000-2006
Pretty obvious, isn't it? (It's "c," for the
film-and-culture-challenged.)
Two IMDb commenters said it better than I
could have:
One of those post-psychedelic burnout
non-movies that came out of the avant-garde independent cinema
fringe in the early 70s. Sondra Locke portrays a female Christ
figure for a bunch of young filmmakers ... and really that's
about it. Chock full of drawn-out senseless images and
pseudo-spiritual kakadoodie, the most troubling thing about this
terrible movie is its smug air of self-importance ... the film
is as hollow as a hat and struts through its duration with the
pride of a peacock.
Hard to sit through and almost impossible to
follow, "The Second Coming of Suzanne" puts you through the same
kind of torture that Suzanne is put through by Logan and the
makers of the film-within-a-film. The movie tries to be arty but
that's just an excuse to cover up its brainless and non-existent
storyline and the terrible and amateurish acting by everyone in
it.
It has all the usual requirements for
hippie-era filmmaking: a nearly complete lack of dialogue, youth
gangs wearing mime make-up, Seventh Seal rip-offs, sitar music,
psychedelic "trips," dream sequences, fish-eye lenses, paintings
coming to life, and of course a crucifixion.
Oh, and nudity. The reason I watched it, of
course, was to see the pre-Eastwood nudity from Sondra Locke.
The film was produced by a well-known TV actor named Gene Barry,
the only film he ever produced, presumably to give his son Michael
Barry a chance to write and direct a movie. It would be the last
time anyone in showbiz would ever hear of Barry the Younger. On the
other hand, Barry the Elder, who also played the right-wing
columnist in this film, some 50 years after Bat Masterson debuted,
was still working a few years ago. And he was already 42 when Bat
Masterson went off the air! According to IMDb, he had a small part
in 2005, at the age of 86, in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. It was
a bit of symmetry. He was also in the 1953 version of the film.
In all those years, The Second Coming of
Suzanne is the worst film (per IMDb rating) in which he is credited
as an actor!
Oh, well, as I said, some movies are
self-reviewing. |
