Neither of the features that comprise our TCM Underground lineup this weekend is new to Turner Classic Movies but the pairing of them is likely to raise eyebrows and emotions in light of certain current events — in particular, a highly-publicized court case involving a California man’s sexual assault of an unconscious woman (and his unconscionably lenient sentencing) and the ascension of the first female nominee for the office of President of the United States. Both SOME CALL IT LOVING (aka SLEEPING BEAUTY) and LOLITA are stories about the possession of women, the control of women, the having of women; both were written by men, presumably for men. What each film says, ultimately, about the never untroubled relationship between the sexes is less important than the questions it raises about the ever-widening gap between male expectations of womanhood and what life actually has to offer.
“Spectators who like to keep their fairy tales innocent, their pornography sordid, their allegories obvious and their dreams intact,” wrote critic Jonathan Rosenbaum in the pages of Film Comment in 1975, “are bound to be disconcerted by James B. Harris’ haunting SOME CALL IT LOVING… which pursues the improbabilities of dream logic to clarify rather than mystify, and tough-mindedly concerns itself with the processes and consequences of dreaming.” At that point, Rosenbaum was championing a movie that had screened to considerable favor at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and had received high marks from the French critics only to tank dismally upon the occasion of its American premiere. Buried by its distributor, SOME KIND OF LOVING nosedived into celluloid limbo, resurfacing eventually on VHS tape in a big box eyesore that seemed to occupy every dusty bottom shelf of every video store in the land; about the only attention paid to the film in retrospect came from Mr. Skin’s Skincyclopedia: The A to Z Guide to Finding Your Favorite Actresses Naked.
British writer John Collier’s Fancies and Goodnights had been published in 1951 and his elegantly ironic stories had drawn from literary critics favorable comparisons to Charles Dickens and Roald Dahl. Numbered among the tales collected in that volume was “Sleeping Beauty,” the story of a dissolute Englishman with more pedigree than liquid assets who nonetheless makes the capital acquisition of a sideshow somnambulist, a beautiful young woman seemingly straight out of the eponymous fairytale. Harris saw in the story a parable about desire and denial and began crafting what would be his sophomore directorial effort, relocating the action from a Regency house in southern England to a castle poised above the craggy coast Southern California. To play his conflicted protagonist, Harris cast TV actor Zalman King, then best known as the star of the short-lived THE YOUNG LAWYERS, a weekly legal drama that had run for a single season on CBS. As the object of King’s affection, Harris took a gamble on Tisa Farrow, kid sister to ROSEMARY’S BABY star Mia Farrow, who had had an ornamental role in René Clément’s 1972 heist film AND HOPE TO DIE (1972). Supporting roles were doled out to comic Richard Pryor (who had not yet established himself as an actor), British actress Carol White, and former THE MUNSTERS trouper Pat Priest.
Principal photography got underway late in 1972 under the working title SLEEPING BEAUTY, until the threat of legal action from Walt Disney Productions prompted Harris to go with the interim title DREAM GIRL before settling on SOME CALL IT LOVING. Shot at various compass points along the Pacific Coast Highway by Italian cinematographer Mario Tosi (whose picaresque career runs the gamut from the softcore 1964 “nudie cutie” SINDERELLA AND THE GOLDEN BRA and American International Pictures’ 1972 revenge-of-nature thriller FROGS to Brian DePalma’s CARRIE [1976] and Richard Rush’s THE STUNT MAN [1977]), SOME CALL IT LOVING plays like an American spin on the erotic works of such cult impresarios as Jess Franco and Jean Rollin or the sensual excesses of Bronx expatriate Radley Metzger, albeit channeled through the unmistakable aesthetic of James B. Harris. Very much the wild card in the deck of Harris’ brief but impressive directing CV, SOME CALL IT LOVING nonetheless reflects Harris’ abiding interest in the power of fantasy to by turns empower and destroy the dreamer.
LOLITA still rankles; by design. Some years ago a feminist film blog gave the Nabokov novel a critical barracking (Deserved? Undeserved? You make the call.), which elicited some interesting responses in the comments section. While one kibitzer felt satisfied that Nabokov must have been an actual child rapist recording his predations behind the veil of fiction, another offered up the sketchy trivia that “Sue Lyon, the 14-year-old actress from the film version, had to leave the film business because of all the sicko attention she got and she is still living in hiding today.” I thought the latter a curious thing to say, given that Lyon went from LOLITA to a 20 year career in the entertainment industries on both North American and European continents — costarring with Richard Burton in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964), playing one of John Ford’s 7 WOMEN (1966), playing the leading lady to George C. Scott in THE FLIM-FLAM MAN (1967) and George Hamilton in EVEL KNIEVEL (1971), losing out on choice roles in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967) and THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE (1968) and traveling abroad to star in such offbeat (but fascinating) Euro-cult offerings as Eloy de la Iglesia’s MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD (aka CLOCKWORK TERROR, 1973) and José María Forqué’s AUTOPSY (aka TAROT, 1973), alongside fellow Hollywood expat Gloria Grahame — and has always been relatively easy to find; when she retreated to private life in the mid-70s, it was because she had had enough of the star treatment, of invasive journalists, of endless questions, of press junkets, and travel-for-work, and a life lived on display. Looking back on her career in the mid-80s in an interview for French television, Lyon proved sanguine and unimpressed by the need for some to believe LOLITA had been a traumatizing experience. “It was only a movie. You now, I didn’t have to have an affair with an old man, I only had to make a movie about it.”