Star 80. - movie reviews

National Review, Feb 10, 1984 by John Simon

BOB FOSSE'S Star 80 deals, or pussyfoots, with a real-life horror story it will not, cannot, dare not fully explore. It concerns the hideous murder of a Playboy playmate and starlet, Dorothy Stratten, by her husband, Paul Snider--a con-man and pimp with aspirations of becoming another Hugh Hefner--who then killed himself. For three reasons, aside from the trashiness of the story, Fosse could not succeed. First, the truth was too grisly to avoid an X rating, meaning a loss in revenue no big-budget picture wishes to incur. And where a story registers, for better or worse, through its horror, soft-pedaling means a loss of nerve that infiltrates the entire operation.

Second, although Snider and Miss Stratten are both safely dead, and her mother and sister could be placated into permission, there is no way in which Hefner, who made Dorothy his Palymate of the Year, and Peter Bogdanovich, who directed her in his last picture show and wanted to make her his mate for life, would have permitted an excess of truth, against which the well-known and well-heeled can be legally immune. Hence any film-maker undertaking to tell such a story knows ahead of time that he will have to skip, finagle, and falsify--another method from which little good can come. But the third and greatest drawback is that Fosse, a dancer and choreographer, is much less of a movie director and not at all a writer: There is not much communicatin between the dancing foot and the writing hand.

Now, it may not be of major interest how a nice but simple Canadian counter-girl falls for a flashy small-time operator who prestidigitates with promises; but how she is persuaded to pose in the nude for a photographer friend of his, and becomes gradually sucked into the Playboy mentality and physicality, is a matter of some psychological interest if only Fosse--as director and his own screenwriter--knew how to handle it other than once over heavily. Although Eric Roberts manages to convey the obsession with luxury and fame of a sleazy fellow who gambles, not on cards or roulette, but on the crunchy freshness of a naive young beauty (whom Mariel Hemingway, despite a silicone implant in her bosom, plays with a minimum of dimensionality, except a tallness that awkwardly towers over everyone else), there is much less detail and insight here than in Teresa Carpenter's report-age, on which the film is partly based.

One suspects that poor Dorothy perceived Hef as the Wizard of Oz, Kahlik Gibran, and Dear abby rolled into one big, sexy Pygmalion, who (and this is one of the film's few authentic touches) always presided over the Playboy Mansion parties in pajamas, the appropriate uniform for dispensing what the Marquis de Sade, in a different context, called la philosophie dans le boudoir. But the script and Cliff Robertson turn Hef into a cross between a teacher of etiquette and a games master at a young ladies' finishing school, where all intercourse is supposed to be strictly social. And though the men she meets at the Mansion may have designs on her, Dorothy, despite her genuine upward mobility in contrast to Paul's ineffectual megalomania (while she poses for classy pictures in Playboy, he stages cheap sex shows in low dives), sticks to and supports her husband in almost the style he lusts after.

Following on a few awkward interviews watched over by Playboy mentors, Dorothy lands some trashy movie roles of which she makes a mess, until the classy director Aram Nicholas (i.e., Bogdanovich) makes her his star and mistress. Their cohabitation in New York is presented with a chastity that would do credit to a nunnery, until Paul, maddened with jealousy and the sense of losing his meal ticket to Fortuna's banquet, lures Dorothy to their Los Angeles house and there shoots her and himself. The particularly sadopornographic details of the murder, as well as of some previous incidents, are merely lip-smackingly hinted at. Indeed, throughout the film we get flash-forwards to Paul, bloody and looking into a mirror, railing against the world and his failure. Each sequence shows more gore on and around him, but the ultimate climax of obscene or, less likely, cathartic terror is thoroughly fudged, though doubtless not for reasons of taste. In fact, the movie lacks even the courage of its bad taste.

What, then, was the reason for making Star 80? Puzzled reviewers have postulated Fosse's disgust with the debasement of show business, or self-hate for former dabblings in commercial sleaziness, or an attempt to exorcise some of his ungallant attitudes toward women. Though there may be something to all of this, the finished film looks to me like an inadvertend tribute to false glamor as well as an attempt to titillate as much as an R rating can be stretched to. The only character who is even superficially examined is Paul Snider; the others, many of whom serve as narrators of segments of the story--a modish and tiresome device--get no real identities or, in some cases, even adequate identification.