Eva Marie Saint's turn as TCM's Star of the Month for her centenary last July gave me another opportunity to record some movies I'd never heard of. One such film was the 1970 film Loving, one I didn't know much about because the 1970s are one of the eras of fim I don't know so much about.
The real star here is George Segal. He plays Brooks Wilson, an advertising artist working out of an office in New York and commuting back to Connecticut, where he lives with his wife Selma (Eva Marie Saint) and two daughters. As the movie opens, Brooks is out of the office for a tryst with his mistress Grace, eventually rushing home because one of his kids is in a school recital. There, he runs into Nelly Parks, wife of his neighbor Will. Brooks really doesn't want to be at that recital however, as he has a lot on his mind.
Much of what's on his mind is a contract for the Lepridon truck company. The owner Mr. Lepridon (Sterling Hayden) is coming to New York from the company's midwestern headquarters, and wants to meet with Brooks. If Brooks can get the contract, it would mean a lot of money, and the Wilsons would be able to move to a bigger house in town, which would make the family look better. It's the sort of town where appearances matter, at least to everyone else in town, if not so much to Brooks, who's been worried about the Lepridon contract for months. And then when Brooks gets to Grace's apartment in New York, he finds that there's another man in the apartment. Talk about awkward.
Brooks turns to alcohol and drinks enough that he nearly misses the important meeting with Lepridon, who seems unhappy with Brooks' drawings on the grounds that he wants photographs that are honest since the trucks are used by unemotional engineering types. It seems enough to doom Brook's chances, and he's still going to have to wait for a while to find out whether he gets the contract. In the meantime, Brooks and Selma go to a home viewing for a home that's being sold because the couple that lived there are getting a divorce.
Eventually, Brooks finds out the good news that he does indeed get the contract. However, it's on the same day as a big party in their neighborhood given by Grace's relatives and inviting a bunch of young smart-set types. In an obvious bit of foreshadowing, it's revealed that the owner has a bunch of closed-circuit cameras installed around the property, and can watch them on one monitor in the study with a remote control switching from camera to camera. Brooks drinks some more and eventually takes Nelly, not Grace or Selma, to an unoccupied playhouse outbuilding, where you can guess what happens.
Loving comes across as emblematic of the sort of "daring" film Hollywood tried to make in the years following the end of the Production Code. It deals with grown-up themes in a way that films from just a decade earlier couldn't possibly do, and does so with location shooting and cinematography that are again totally different from what Hollywood gave us through the early 1960s. However, as a story, for me Loving doesn't quite work. It's not that it's a particularly bad movie or anything; it's more that I find it hard to feel an attachment to any of these characters. It's as if the characters are all supposed to feel a sense of disillusionment or something, but that the end result is the viewer feeling disillusioned with the characters.
I think, however, that people who are fans of the American cinematic style of the early 1970s will probably enjoy Loving. It's more that it's not a film for everyone.
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