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| Jerilee Randall (Pia Zadora) wins a Creative Writing trophy. So naturally, she decides to become a screenwriter. |
Release Date: Sept. 30, 1983. Running Time: 92 minutes. Screenplay: John Kershaw, Shawn Randall. Based on the Novel by: Harold Robbins. Producer: Robert R. Weston. Director: Peter Sasdy.
THE PLOT:
After winning a Creative Writing trophy, schoolgirl Jerilee Randall (Pia Zadora) agrees to let the son of Hollywood screenwriter Walter Thornton (Lloyd Bochner) take her to his famous father's home. It proves to be a bad decision, as one of the boy's friends sexually assaults her - an attack that is stopped when Walter returns home.
Walter looks after her during her recovery, and the two strike up a friendship based on her love of writing. They end up marrying, over the objections of Jerilee's mother (Bibi Besch), and against all reason they seem reasonably happy... until Jerilee takes a job doing rewrites on Walter's latest film, sparking jealousy and resentment that destroys the marriage.
Now on her own, Jerilee decides she wants to get her own script made. She goes about this though all the usual channels: cold-calling agents and producers, sleeping with married actors, and dating a club owner who talks about maybe possibly making a movie. Somehow, none of this brings her closer to selling her script - but we do see a lot of Pia Zadora naked, so I suppose that's something...
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| Walter (Lloyd Bochner) comes to resent his young wife's talent. |
CHARACTERS:
Jerilee Randall: Pia Zadora's Jerilee is in almost every scene, and she represents the void at the heart of this movie. Jerilee never grows or changes as a character. She remains the same throughout, no matter how many terrible things happen to her. Sexual assault, divorce, abortion, and being generally used and abused? No impact at all. There are script cues indicating that she's meant to be abusing alcohol, but these fall flat because Zadora never plays the character as drunk or even slightly unsteady. She shows no wariness or hesitation in her third romantic relationship, even after her mistreatment the first two times around. True, the script is terrible - but a good actress would have tried to force an arc by adding a note of mental exhaustion to differentiate later scenes from earlier ones; Zadora is just blandly sunny throughout, to the point that her ending speech seems to come out of nowhere.
Walter Thornton: Throughout the first third, he is kind and solicitous. Despite the enormous age difference between him and Jerilee and some... ah, performance issues on his part, their marriage seems more or less healthy, with them interacting amiably and with good humor. Then, after she makes a rewrite to one of his scripts that ends up pleasing everyone, he becomes angry, bitter, and jealous. Like many aspects of this movie, this could have been done well, through a gradual revelation of his pettiness and insecurity. But that's not what we get. Walter is nothing but kind and decent for most of his scenes; then a switch is flipped, and he becomes to all intents and purposes a completely different character.
Veronica Randall: Bibi Besch is wasted in a thankless and ill-defined role as Jerilee's mother. I never got much of a sense of her relationship with her daughter. She resists Jerilee's marriage to Walter - but given the stark age difference, what parent wouldn't? She's unsupportive after Jerilee leaves Walter, but she and Jerilee seem to get along well when they go out for her birthday. Besch struggles valiantly, putting on an air of concerned bewilderment, but there's no throughline here and barely a character for her to even attempt to play.
Guy Jackson: Jerilee's one genuine friend throughout the film, a homosexual movie director who ends up being the only decent man in the film. Yes, it feels cynical that the only male in the movie who doesn't screw Jerilee over is the only one who doesn't want to physically screw her. On the page, Guy just fulfills the "gay best friend" trope, but in contrast to the rest of the cast, actor Anthony Holland makes him work as a character. We see his growing concern as Jerilee makes one bad decision after another, and we sense the weary wisdom he's learned well before he mentors Jerilee through the process of finally getting her script made.
Every Other Character in the Movie: Ray Liotta, in his film debut, at least shows some screen presence in his brief screen time. Which doesn't change that he's playing the one-note character of Joe the Rapist, who fits right in with one-note characters such as George the Adulterer (Jared Martin) and Vinnie the Druggie (Joseph Call). Pretty much every man in this movie is portrayed as a cartoonishly lecherous user and abuser. Before you go labeling it anti-male, though, it should be pointed out that the female characters are equally horrible, be it the backstabbing friend (Kendal Kaldwell) or the predatory lesbian (Carla Romanelli).
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| Jerilee tries to sell her script, only to find that her writing isn't what people are in interested in. |
"SAY SOMETHING NICE":
The Lonely Lady is the story of a woman writer who is dismissed, abused, patronized, and taken advantage of as she attempts to get her work taken seriously. She is sneered at for being too young and pretty ("She doesn't look like a writer"), men take credit for her work, and she is gradually driven to desperate action and a breakdown by all of the pressures.
If you look at the bare bones of the story, there is potential here. In the right hands, this could have been gripping and powerful. The right hands probably never included Harold Robbins, and definitely never included anyone associated with the making of this movie. Still, every so often you can catch a glimpse of what a competent screenwriter, director, and lead actress might have made of this.
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| Ray Liotta plays a one-note rapist... and he still gives probably the best performance in the movie. |
"SO... EXACTLY WHAT WERE THEY ON?":
A little over ten minutes into the movie, teenage Jerilee is sexually assaulted. This occurs before we've had any real chance to connect with her, and the incident is framed with a bit of victim blaming; if only Jerilee had kept her promise to her mother to leave the party early, then nothing would have happened. But don't worry: Jerilee suffers no apparent psychological harm. The rape exists solely as a plot device to get Jerilee together with Walter, and it is only mentioned once more in a particularly crude callback.
Late in the movie, after her latest sleazy boyfriend uses promises to produce her script to get her to agree to prostitute herself to a European couple, Jerilee has a mental breakdown. This scene is epically bad. Pia Zadora rips papers, screams, breaks a window, takes a shower with her clothes on, breaks some more things, and then has an LSD-like hallucination. The scene was one of several that apparently left preview audiences laughing, and it was nearly removed... but Razzie co-founder John Wilson persuaded the producers to keep the scene, mainly because he desperately wanted to use it as a clip at awards time. The scene is even more protracted in the television version, stretched out to make up for all the other bits that had to be cut for the censors.
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| Jerilee breaks down. Or possibly regenerates into Doctor Who. |
OTHER MUSINGS
I haven't read Harold Robbins' The Lonely Lady, but I feel confident that the book was better. Robbins may have churned out sleazy potboilers, but they tended to be reasonably well-written sleazy potboilers. He understood how to structure stories, and how to make one event flow into the next. His characters weren't exactly wellsprings of depth, but they usually went through some type of arc. In short, he was an entirely competent novelist.
The Lonely Lady is entirely incompetent. It's less a story than a series of scenes, many of which seem almost unconnected. A decent script would show each individual incident chipping away at Jerilee a little bit more, wearing her down a little bit further, until the breakdown became inevitable. Here, the breakdown is one more incident that just happens to come a little later in the parade of incidents.
Jerilee is on screen almost constantly, and she fails miserably as a main character. We see early in the movie that she has already found some success as a prose writer, with two published books already to her name. So why does selling a screenplay become such an obsession? We're told she's in it for the art... but prose writing is far less restrictive and vastly more author-driven than screenwriting is. Even if we accept Jerilee's drive to see a movie made of her work, once the roadblocks are clear, why not focus on the writing career that's going well? Sooner or later a producer would want to buy rights to one of her books, at which point she could make writing the screenplay a condition of sale.
As I alluded to in the plot description, the way Jerilee goes about her quest is utterly senseless. She actually says that she has a literary agent. OK, prose agents rarely handle screenplays even today, let alone in 1983. Even so, her agent likely knows someone who does handle scripts. Given this, she should be talking to her agent as her first step in shifting to screenwriting. She certainly should be doing so before resorting to the desperate tactic of "sleep with icky couple pretending to be movie producers."
The portrayal of writers on movie sets is also bizarre. When Jerilee goes onto the set of Walter's latest film, it is clear that Walter's presence is considered indispensable. Walter is not the director, and there's no indication that he's a producer. He is the writer - which is to say, he's doing better than most screenwriters to even be welcome on the set, let alone actually valued. He's annoyed that his wife rewrites one of his scenes, when he should be feeling lucky to have this done by a published author and not some worn out and possibly barely literate intern!
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| Jerilee at work. And eating a pencil to show she's concentrating. |
THE OTHER NOMINEES:
1983 was a pretty bad year for movies, and The Lonely Lady faced stiff competition in its journey to being named Worst Picture of the Year. I haven't seen the Lou Ferrigno Hercules or the John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John bomb Two of a Kind, but I have no doubt that both are pretty bad (though Hercules might be fun in a dumb way). Jaws 3-D is so jaw-droppingly bad that it's almost worth watching as a "so-bad-it's-good" comedy, while Stroker Ace has the dubious distinction of being Burt Reynolds' worst smash-'em-up.
Of the films on that list that I've seen, I would agree that The Lonely Lady is the worst. Save for the campy/funny breakdown scene, it's just... boring. Which is the one cinematic sin I can never forgive.
OVERALL:
Of the four Worst Picture winners I've reviewed so far, The Lonely Lady is easily the poorest film. It's cheap looking. It's badly acted. Its script is dreadful, failing to build any elements and just presenting a series of scenes. It's not even good exploitation, with its many sex scenes all shot in the same style: "TV soap opera, only with the naughty bits showing."
Even bad movie fans should avoid - though you may want to look up the breakdown scene on YouTube, as it is the one bit of the film that manages to be "fun bad" instead of "just plain bad."
Rating: Flushable Wipe (Used).
Worst Picture: 1982 - Inchon!
Worst Picture: 1984 - Bolero
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