Insignificance

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars back in 2024 was Tony Curtis, and among the films of his that I hadn't seen before TCM ran them was one from later in Curtis' career called Insignificance. The synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it in order to watch and write up a review here.

It's sometime in the early 1950s, in New York City, and it looks for all the world like the famous subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch is being filmed. Except that none of the characters are actually given names so the actress who looks like it's supposed to be Marilyn Monroe is just The Actress, played by Theresa Russell. After shooting wraps for the day, her taxi driver is supposed to take her back to her hotel. But she has him stop at a newsstand and then, wanting to get away from everybody, she goes to a different hotel.

In that hotel is a Professor (Michael Emil), who looks a lot like Albert Einstein and is clearly working on some sort of advanced physics as he's got a ton of papers around him. Einstein, like this professor, was open about the idea that using nuclear as a weapon was something with which he was uncomfortable. As a result, after the Americans won World War II and then Soviet spies got the knowledge to make their own atomic weapons, some in high political office considered the atomic scientists politically suspect. Tony Curtis plays The Senator, based obviously on Joseph McCarthy, and he shows up at the Professor's hotel room trying to get the Professor to testify in front of the Senate committee, which the Professor doesn't wish to do.

And then The Actress knocks on the Professor's door. Each of them is happy to be in the presence of a kindred soul, and each of them seems to be intellectually curious, so they start talking about each other's lives, with the Actress describing how she understands the theory of relativity. The Professor, having a full suite and not just a single room, is willing to let The Actress crash for the night as well since she clearly wants to get out of the limelight for the evening.

Complicating matters is that the Actress is in the middle of a marriage that isn't going well, to a prominent baseball player (Gary Busey). This is an obvious reference to Joe DiMaggio. It's posited that one of the reasons that the marriage isn't going well is that the Actress is unable to carry a pregancy to term, and as the movie reaches its climax, such as the climax is, it seems as though she's currently pregnant but about to suffer a miscarriage from all the stress she's going through in her life. Or this could just be an illusion on her part, as the movie plays with time and has characters go through flashbacks and have thoughts about the future.

It's the way the movie goes back and forth in time that makes Insignificance a tough picture to get into. That, and the fact that for me the movie feels a bit like Boomerporn, or at least the sort of personalities that the first half of the Baby Boom generation would be thought to have as cultural touchstones are the subject here, thirty years removed from when the movie is set. I've stated before that I'm not the biggest fan of movies that take a doe-eyed look back at that era, and Insignificance has a decided visual look of artificially trying to recreate the early 1950s. So Insignificance is definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody.