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| Mac (Bo Derek) gets high in a Casbah. Maybe the rest of the film is a hallucination? |
Release Date: Aug. 31, 1984. Running Time: 104 minutes. Screenplay: John Derek. Producer: Bo Derek. Director: John Derek.
THE PLOT:
"Mac" McGillvary (Bo Derek) is an American heiress living in 1920s England. On the day she graduates from her unnamed but presumably prestigious university, she is granted access to her inheritance. Now that she is both wealthy and officially educated, she decides it's time to leave England for other parts of the world, to start doing things that really matter...
Such as losing her virginity to a real-life Arab sheikh.
This does not go well. The sheikh in question (Greg Benson) is so English in both education and temperament, Mac might as well have stayed in England. He also draws one puff too many from his magic hookah and falls asleep before he can do the deed.
Thwarted in Morocco, Mac adjusts her expectations and jettisons "sheikh" from her lovemaking requirements. Then she heroically bundles herself, best friend Catalina (Ana Obregon), and chauffer Cotton (George Kennedy) off to Spain, where she almost instantly falls for vineyard owner/amateur bullfighter Angel (Andrea Occhipinti).
Mac isn't the only one with designs on Angel's manly attributes. Evita (Mirta Miller), Angel's gypsy lover, is unreasonably jealous that a wealthy American woman openly wants to sleep with her boyfriend. Adolescent gypsy girl Paloma (Olivia d'Abo) fantasizes about Angel being her first. But the fiercest competition comes from a bull with targeted designs on Angel's favorite toy, and their encounter in the ring soon renders Mac's quest for the horizontal mambo medically impossible - or at least, highly improbable.
But Mac isn't about to give up merely because some doctors say that Angel will almost certainly never, um, dance again. So she rises to the challenge with a valiant campaign to arouse his interest...
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| Mac sets her sights on Angel (Andrea Occhipinti). |
CHARACTERS:
"Mac" McGillvary: I struggle to think of reasons beyond the obvious to even remotely sympathize with Mac. In her first scene with chauffer Cotton, she fires him so that he will speak his mind, then immediately rehires him on the condition that he be her friend. Charming. She ignores Catalina's protests about going to Spain. After all, Mac is the rich American; Catalina will go where she's told. She sets her sights on a man who is already in a relationship, then is mystified that the other woman has a problem with this. Bo Derek won a Worst Actress Razzie, but I'd say she actually comes off better than she should. On the page, this character is a monstrous queen of entitlement (it wouldn't be hard to rewrite this so that she's the villain - and doing so would greatly improve the film!), but Derek manages to bring a certain naive likability to this genuinely dreadful role.
Cotton: I am in absolute awe of George Kennedy's ability to make embarrassing career decisions. Kennedy became a name in the late '60s and early '70s, winning an Academy Award for his outstanding performance in Cool Hand Luke and investing a sense of authenticity into films such as Flight of the Phoenix, The Boston Strangler, and Airport. He then proceeded to demolish much of his reputation through a succession of increasingly poor "B" movies in the '70s and '80s. For what it's worth, and despite his own Razzie win, he's probably the best thing in this. His face is practically fixed in a bemused expression as he watches Mac's peculiar odyssey and occasionally makes snarky comments... which basically makes him the audience stand-in.
Angel Sacristan: Andrea Occhipintl has had a prolific career as both an actor and producer in Europe. He has also won awards for his dedication to theatrical distribution of independent films. But in Bolero, he is awful. He seems uncomfortable acting in English, his zombie-like line deliveries screaming of phonetically learned dialogue. He has no chemistry with Bo Derek, and their romance feels like what you might get if a teenage boy tormented his younger sister by undressing and then lewdly posing her plastic Ken and Barbie dolls.
Catalina: This film has too many problems to even list all of them, but one of the most obvious is that the "best friend" character is vastly more appealing than the actual lead. Catalina is just as poorly written as Mac, but Ana Obregon has energy and actual facial expressions, and bits and pieces of the film spark to something resembling life when she's onscreen. There's a subplot in which she pushes Mac to buy Angel's winery and let her run it, quickly revealing a sharp business mind when she negotiates with the bank. I wouldn't go so far as to call this interesting, but it is at least "interesting-adjacent"... making it all the more irritating every time we cut away from her bits to Mac and Angel's plastic romance.
Paloma: Olivia d'Abo was 14 years old when her scenes were filmed, and she's naked for a lot of those scenes. Even in the 1980s, I'm pretty sure that was a "no go." d'Abo's performance really isn't all that bad, given the limits of her poorly written role, and it's unsurprising that her career more or less recovered from her disastrous first year of acting (Conan the Destroyer was the better of her first two films... and Conan the Destroyer was not a good movie). That said, the accent she adopts is as bizarre as it is uneven, making many of her scenes unintentionally funny.
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| At least it's a nice-looking bad movie... |
"SAY SOMETHING NICE":
Bolero is a genuinely awful movie, but it is gorgeous to look at. When Mac reviews her inheritance, she and the young attorney are framed in silhouette. This adds nothing to the scene dramatically or thematically - but it is beautiful, so much so that my breath was momentarily taken away. Later, Mac cavorts with a young, English-educated sheikh, in a scene carefully modeled after Rudolf Valentino's silent films, complete with intertitles. This is the cleverest bit in the movie, with both titles and shots eye-catchingly rendered.
Almost every frame is beautifully set up and lit. I honestly think John Derek might have done better to have split up the negative into a series of still frames and released it as a 1920s-themed show of photographic art, doing a world tour and charging admission. It probably wouldn't have fared worse financially, and the results would have actually had some artistic merit.
"SO... EXACTLY WHAT WERE THEY ON?":
Late in the film, the sheikh reappears. His henchmen infiltrate this rural Spanish village by cleverly disguising themselves in full Arab robes. Black robes, the better to show up in daylight. They kidnap Mac and bring her to the sheikh, waiting to fly off with her in an airplane.
Cotton runs to the rescue! Giving us the eye-popping sight of George Kennedy attempting to stop a biplane from taking off by gripping its rudder with his bare hands. The sheikh should give up right there; if the Airport pictures have taught us anything, it's that a plane is doomed once George Kennedy gets anywhere near it. Kennedy finally meets his match, however; the sheikh actually takes off, leading to Mac rescuing herself by jumping out of the plane. This might be halfway exciting, but it would also cost money... so just as she's about to jump, we cut away to her later describing the events to her friends.
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| George Kennedy meets an airplane he can't crash. |
OTHER MUSINGS
After the dreariness of The Lonely Lady, I approached Bolero with a certain optimism. Sure, it was going to be trash; that was a given. But a collaboration with Bo and John Derek, co-starring George Kennedy and released by Cannon, the studio that was the king of '80s schlock? Surely it was at least going to be fun trash, right?
Wrong.
Bolero is one of the most incredibly boring movies I have had the misfortune to endure. It's beautiful to look at, and I was genuinely taken by the young Ana Obregon, but in every other respect this is a shockingly incompetent 105 minutes of celluloid that barely deserves to be called a movie.
Actors visibly struggle with their lines on camera. There are at least two scenes featuring actors flubbing their lines and correcting themselves. In one scene, Bo Derek and Ana Obregon stumble and stutter over their dialogue in a manner that's somewhat painful to watch. This is acceptable for live television. In a big-budget motion picture, though, it is reasonable to expect that when an actor flubs a line, the filmmakers will do a retake.
But never mind that. There's only one reason other than "Razzie marathon" for anyone to watch Bolero, and that's to see Bo Derek naked. I can't fault the film for false advertising: She gets naked quite a lot, featuring in three of the film's four sex scenes.
Unfortunately, these sex scenes are staggeringly unappealing. The film doesn't repeat The Lonely Lady's problem of offering flatly shot, TV style sex. No, these scenes have camera movements, and backgrounds, and really try to be imaginative. They just... miss the mark by a truly remarkable degree. Bo has honey slathered all over her in one bit; instead of being sexy, it mainly comes across as gross. She sticks her tongue into Angel's ear in another scene... which, as staged, mainly comes across as weird. The finale sees her and Angel making love with smoke billowing around them and a neon "Extasy" sign in the background... which solely comes across as laughable. If you showed me a bit from that scene out of context, I'd assume it was a parody of cologne ads that was advertising a scent dubbed "Extasy."
I will credit the film this much. The mid-'80s were filled with horrible movies about idiotic young men trying to lose their virginity; most attempts to make similar movies about young women, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Little Darlings, saw quality and substance sneaking in to ruin the formula. With Bolero, the Dereks managed to break that glass ceiling and deliver a movie about a vacuous woman losing her virginity that was even stupider than the male-centered films with that plotline. So... progress?
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| Mac with her best friend, Catalina (Ana Obregon), who is a lot more appealing than Mac is. |
THE OTHER NOMINEES:
1984 was a great year for movies: from Amadeus to Ghostbusters, from Once Upon a Time in America to The Karate Kid, it was a year that delivered quality motion pictures for audiences both highbrow and lowbrow.
There was no lack of godawful movies, though, and the Razzie nominee list for 1984 is a recitation of utter turds. Burt Reynolds showed his commitment to wrecking his once-fine career with Cannonball Run II, a sequel that makes the original Cannonball Run look almost like respectable cinema. I haven't seen Where the Boys Are '84, but I'm sure it's mind-numbing. The Tanya Roberts vehicle Sheena is at least passably amusing "laugh-at-it" trash. Probably the best of the pitiful lot is Rhinestone, an alleged comedy in which Sylvester Stallone sings country music opposite Dolly Parton; it's terrible, but Parton and co-star Richard Farnsworth provide a few amusing moments.
As poor as the competition was, though, I have to back the Razzies' choice. Bolero is almost transcendent in its awfulness. At a mere 105 minutes, it feels longer than Gone with the Wind. It offers up beautiful images, but there is not a single legitimately good scene. I only got through the movie by watching it in 10 - 15 minute chunks... and even that was something of a trial.
OVERALL:
A movie made to exploit Bo Derek's assets, which had already been displayed in better films. If you want to see naked people going at it, just watch some porn - You'll get more of what you came for, and there's decent odds that you'll also get a better script.
Rating: Flushable Wipe (Used). I almost feel like I was too hard on The Lonely Lady. Almost.
Worst Picture: 1983 - The Lonely Lady
Worst Picture: 1985 - Rambo: First Blood, Part II
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