Every few years along comes an actor (or actress) whose unexplained vogue results in such ludicrous miscasting that he (or she) soon finds the welcome mat snatched away. In the early 1960s it was Lawrence Harvey, co-starring in such big productions as Butterfield 8, The Manchurian Candidate, and Edward Dmytryk's Walk on the Wild Side (a decade later it would be Michael Sarrazin). Russian-born and classically trained Harvey doesn't quite cut it as a Texas dirt-farmer, but then, in this engagingly lurid festival of miscasting, he doesn't stick out, either.
After his father's slow death early in the Depression, Harvey hits the road to find his lost love, the enigmatic Capucine. Instead, he meets up with Jane Fonda, playing po' white trash right out of a summer-playhouse revival of Tobacco Road. They ride the rails together, stopping in an ethnic beanery on the outskirts of New Orleans, run by Tex-Mex widow Anne Baxter. Harvey and Fonda part ways, but Harvey, who strikes some incestuously maternal chord in Baxter's capacious bosom, finds a crib and a job as a hired hand. End of act one.
Act two opens in a French Quarter sporting house, proprietress Barbara Stanwyck (`Jo'). The star boarder in the pleasure dome she ruthlessly runs is, you guessed it, none other than Capucine. Among her privileges is being allowed to sculpt in the courtyard suite where she's paid to entertain gentlemen callers (though her bust of Stanwyck looks like one of the late Roman emperors). Capucine stays blithely unaware that Harvey runs want-ads in the Times-Picayune to find her, but the protective Stanwyck sets out to insure that the old flames never unite in romantic conflagration. Then Harvey gets a telephoned tip-off from the vindictive Fonda, who, rescued from jail on a charge of vagrancy by the always compassionate madam, has joined her stable....
A Walk on the Wild Side is a cat's-cradle of unrequited lusts (and in what is possibly the movie's best sequence Saul Bass' titles a black alley-cat prowls the Big Easy's nightscape till the fur flies). Harvey and Stanwyck (not to mention paying customers) want Capucine; Fonda and Baxter want Harvey; Stanwyck's legless husband (wheeling around on a hand-driven pushcart) wants her, but no dice there she makes it clear that physical love, at least with males of the species, repulses her.
Drawn from a novel by Nelson Algren, a mid-20th-century author of some repute, Walk on the Wild Side's a smoky étouffée that may have been hot stuff around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it's literal and overwrought, and not in the good old `coded' way. Lapses abound Fonda expresses gleeful shock that Harvey's true love and her co-worker are one in the same woman; did she forget her phone call? Still, the film has the courage of its low convictions. The mannikin-like Capucine hoards the script's best lines when she's standing up to Stanwyck (who shows her formidable acting chops, though not quite so vividly as another brothel-keeper named Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden). A Walk on the Wild Side shares a vision of South-Coast corruption with Flamingo Road, an earlier, campier melodrama. Were it a little campier itself, Walk on the Wild Side would be more fun. Alas, with its soured, downbeat ending, it takes itself all too seriously.
After his father's slow death early in the Depression, Harvey hits the road to find his lost love, the enigmatic Capucine. Instead, he meets up with Jane Fonda, playing po' white trash right out of a summer-playhouse revival of Tobacco Road. They ride the rails together, stopping in an ethnic beanery on the outskirts of New Orleans, run by Tex-Mex widow Anne Baxter. Harvey and Fonda part ways, but Harvey, who strikes some incestuously maternal chord in Baxter's capacious bosom, finds a crib and a job as a hired hand. End of act one.
Act two opens in a French Quarter sporting house, proprietress Barbara Stanwyck (`Jo'). The star boarder in the pleasure dome she ruthlessly runs is, you guessed it, none other than Capucine. Among her privileges is being allowed to sculpt in the courtyard suite where she's paid to entertain gentlemen callers (though her bust of Stanwyck looks like one of the late Roman emperors). Capucine stays blithely unaware that Harvey runs want-ads in the Times-Picayune to find her, but the protective Stanwyck sets out to insure that the old flames never unite in romantic conflagration. Then Harvey gets a telephoned tip-off from the vindictive Fonda, who, rescued from jail on a charge of vagrancy by the always compassionate madam, has joined her stable....
A Walk on the Wild Side is a cat's-cradle of unrequited lusts (and in what is possibly the movie's best sequence Saul Bass' titles a black alley-cat prowls the Big Easy's nightscape till the fur flies). Harvey and Stanwyck (not to mention paying customers) want Capucine; Fonda and Baxter want Harvey; Stanwyck's legless husband (wheeling around on a hand-driven pushcart) wants her, but no dice there she makes it clear that physical love, at least with males of the species, repulses her.
Drawn from a novel by Nelson Algren, a mid-20th-century author of some repute, Walk on the Wild Side's a smoky étouffée that may have been hot stuff around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it's literal and overwrought, and not in the good old `coded' way. Lapses abound Fonda expresses gleeful shock that Harvey's true love and her co-worker are one in the same woman; did she forget her phone call? Still, the film has the courage of its low convictions. The mannikin-like Capucine hoards the script's best lines when she's standing up to Stanwyck (who shows her formidable acting chops, though not quite so vividly as another brothel-keeper named Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden). A Walk on the Wild Side shares a vision of South-Coast corruption with Flamingo Road, an earlier, campier melodrama. Were it a little campier itself, Walk on the Wild Side would be more fun. Alas, with its soured, downbeat ending, it takes itself all too seriously.