Remember My Name

I mentioned a couple weeks back that Geraldine Chaplin was honored in Summer Under the Stars with a day of her movies. But there was another movie that I had on the DVR from an earlier day in Summer Under the Stars in which she was also in the cast. That movie was Remember My Name, which TCM ran on Anthony Perkins' day.

Chaplin plays Emily, who at the start of the movie is being released from southern California prison for a crime we're not told about until much later in the movie. Apparently, whatever work she did inside prison was quite remunerative, or else she had a fair bit of money from somewhere, since she's able to go to a nice boutique and buy some pretty nice clothes for herself. She's able to get a room in a rooming house run by Pike (Moses Gunn), and is eventually able to get a job at a department store run by Mr. Nudd (a very young Jeff Goldblum) since his mom is in prison too and met Emily there.

Anthony Perkins plays Neil Curry, a construction worker building new tract housing, which is a reasonably good job since this is the era when there were still a lof of Americans moving west to the Los Angeles area. He's got a wife Barbara (Perkins' real-life wife Berry Berenson), but you get the impression there's a bit of tension between the two. Needless to say, there's about to be a lot more tension between the two.

That's because Emily shows up in the neighborhood, looking like she's casing the Curry place, even though there's not much to case since they're decidedly lower-middle-class at best. More likely Emily has another reason for being there, and that she'll reveal it soon enough. That does happen in rather more dramatic fashion when Emily breaks into the Curry plays and Barbara is the one to find her since Neil is still at work.

Barbara rather logically wants to press charges, and Emily is taken to the police station for booking, but Emily clearly has something that she can use to blackmail Neil with. This is something that Neil has been less than forthcoming with Barbara about, and when Emily uses it to get Neil to decide not to press charges, he realizes that he's going to have to tell Barbara the truth.

Remember My Name is a faily slow-moving picture where there's not a whole lot going on on the surface, but there's clearly a lot more going on underneath. This allows tension to build up while building an unsettling atmosphere. The three main characters make the material work, although it's also easy to see how Remember My Name is a movie that isn't going to appeal to everybody.

The other thing that may make it off-putting for some is the way in which it feels like there's a fair bit that never really gets answered. In addition to the way this happens with the main plot, there's a recurring theme throught the movie that seems totally unrelated to the rest of the film in which we hear TV news reports about a catastrophic earthquake in Budapest. (As far as I can tell, there's never been a serious earthquake in Hungary; there was one in Bucharest Romania a year or two before the movie was released.)

Remember My Name is a different sort of movie that those who like 1970s movies should definitely enjoy.