User Reviews

Much has been said about the bad casting, but I find it all fitting indeed. The plot is one of the endless variations on La Traviata - the whore with a heart of gold - but it has some twists in it that are original. Stanwyck is great in this first 'out' gay role of any character in films.

Capucine is one the great beauties of film. Her acting is icy - which is perfect. Did you note how she changes her mind depending on whom she's talking to? It's clear the character has no mind of her own - until it's too late. Perfect.

The Fonda-Harvey prelude is terrific. And of course the plotting brings her significantly back in the denouement. There's not a wasted motif in the plot. Stanwyck's husband at the beginning and end. It's easy to cry 'pot-boiler' but that's a vacuous charge against this better than average movie, certainly a milestone of sorts.

The surprising thing about watching this 1962 film 50-years later is how hard it pushed the censorship of the day.

Toned down from Nelson Algren's novel, the whole thing involves a number of people attracted to characters who are not attracted to them.

Kitty Twist (Jane Fonda) and Dove Linkhorn (Laurence Harvey) team up on the road as they head to New Orleans. Jane Fonda is arresting in a figure-clinging dress, and although she fancies Dove, he fancies a woman called Hallie (Capucine) in New Orleans. Along the way they encounter Teresina (Anne Baxter) running a roadside café. She also fancies Dove but he still only has thoughts for Hallie.

The rest of the film revolves around the Doll House, a brothel in New Orleans run by Jo Courtney (Barbara Stanwyck).

Dove and Kitty end up at the Doll House where we find that Jo also fancies Hallie who really doesn't seem to fancy anyone. Other characters are introduced with suggestions of various sexual appetites with the oddest being Schmidt, Jo's ex-husband who has lost both legs. He still fancies her, but...

On it goes until the whole thing comes to a head back at Teresina's café.

Seeing this group of glamorous and vital actors has added piquancy knowing most of them have now gone; some too young: Laurence Harvey at 45, Anne Baxter and Capucine both at 62.

To star in the film, Anne Baxter took time out from her life on an Australian cattle station, where she lived for four years. It still seems about the most random thing any well-known Hollywood actress ever did. She married an American who bought the property in the Barrington Tops area of NSW. She wrote a book about the experience called "Intermission'', full of insights into Australian rural life. She was a good story teller; the few anecdotes about movie-making included in "Intermission" show that she could have written a book about Hollywood to rival Niven's "The Moon's a Balloon", which came out around the same time.

Along with a brilliant title sequence, the film has a great score and song by Elmer Bernstein. 10-years later, Lou Reed came up with a song of the same name that nailed the concept more succinctly (apparently it was also kick-started by Algren's novel).

Although more of interest for the stars these days, "Walk on the Wild Side" would no doubt still burn up the screen if anyone made a faithful version of the novel today.

This films is to New Orleans bordellos what "The Best of Everything" was to advertisement agencies and "Valley of the Dolls" was to Broadway hopefuls. Unlike those two "A" grade Technicolor soap operas, this film doesn't hide its garbage, and lacks the unintentional humor of those pot-boilers.

The story surrounds a drifter (Laurence Harvey) who encounters the tough-talking Jane Fonda (as "Kitty Twist", a drag name if I ever heard one...) on his way out of Texas to New Orleans to locate his former lover (Capucine) and on the way, they encounter kindly Mexican diner owner Anne Baxter (!) who takes Harvey on as a hired hand after Fonda tries to rip her off. Capucine turns up in the "dollhouse", a bordello owned by the tough Jo (Barbara Stanwyck) who has more of an interest on her than a madame/whore business relationship. Jo is so cruel that she can't even buy her legless husband a wheelchair, content to see him maneuver his way around on a wheeled plank instead. Harvey, determined to win his old love back, utilizes Kitty (convienantly now one of Jo's "girls") and Baxter for help to predictable results.

You may need a shower after watching this perverse examination of degradation. Even with engrossing performances (although Baxter's casting as a Mexican lady is a bit eye-raising) this film never rises above its filthy bottom. Stanwyck's Jo certainly garners the most attention, unashamed to be playing an extremely vicious and possessive lesbian, only revealing tenderness in her character a few brief scenes with Capucine and her distaste for men in a dramatic explosion with her pathetic husband. The reason for his missing legs is never explained, only inferred. The 25 year old Fonda's character (supposedly under-aged) is not fully developed, while Capucine gives an appropriately restrained performance as a character pretty much dead in everything but flesh. Hero Harvey seems out of sorts in a role which required more subtle brooding. Somehow, he comes off as a gentleman on the opposite side of the tracks who decided to experiment with life by slumming.

I'm surprised to see so many comments praising the camp and trash value of a serious studio effort to push the Production Code out of the way. For 1962, it's pretty racy, and more honest about bordello life in New Orleans than you'd expect. After a great Saul Bass title sequence, we get fabulous deep-focus photography, evocative Elmer Bernstein scoring, and an interesting if not always ideal cast. Laurence Harvey, never the most convincing actor, does sport a secure Texas accent and evokes undying devotion and neediness touchingly; Anne Baxter stretches herself, not badly; Capucine's wooden but beautiful; Stanwyck does tough-old-broad as only she can, with some fairly frank lesbian overtones she's fearless about; and Jane Fonda is hot as all getout, and what others call overacting I see as leavening. The movie's livelier while she's in it, we miss her when she disappears a half-hour into it, and we're happier when she returns. Where the movie fails is in plotting--how did Capucine ever end up in Texas, anyway?; if the two of them want to be together, why doesn't he just accept Stanwyck's deal and meet up later in some other state?--but it has atmosphere, and brooding, for days.

**SPOILERS** Ground breaking Hollywood movie in it being the first to have a major Hollywood actress Barbara Stanwyck play the in your face, not suggested, unapologetic bull dike lesbian Jo Courtney. It's Jo who runs the notorious bordello the "Doll House" in the French Quarter in New Orleans back in the 1930's. In fact at the start-as well as end- of the movie we do see this scroungy looking black cat walking through this dark alley in cadences with the title theme song "Walk on the Wild Side" as a foreshadow of things to come in the film.

It's when Texas dirt farmer Dove Linkhorn, Laurence Harvey, unexpectedly shows up at the "Doll House" looking for his girlfriend Hallie Gerard, Capucine, that the hasn't seen in three years that the sparks really start flying in the movie. As we, but not the very naive Dove, all see Hallie is the whorehouse madame's, Jo Countrey, personal squeeze or lover and she's not at all ready to let Hallie check out on her with another man or woman if that was the case. Hallie for her part has somewhat become accustomed to her boss Jo's lesbian advances even though she's straight! Since Hallie feels that she owes Jo at least that much for taking her off the streets, in New York's Greenwich Village, when she was a struggling artist and giving her the life of luxury that she's now so used to.

Slowly but surly the not so with it, in not knowing what exactly is going on, country hick Dove gets the love starved, for a man, Hallie to see things his way in taking off with him back to his dead father's, who Dove had been caring for the last three years, farm in Texas. This has the now dejected Jo throw a fit and try to do everything to split the loving couple up! To the point of both blackmail and murder! It's when Jo finds out that one of her ladies of the evening teenager Kitty Twist, Jane Fonda, rode the rail's with Dove to New Orleans crossing the Texas border that she uses that fact, even as Dove always said he never once touched Kitty, to blackmail Dove in him violating the Mann Act: Trafficking under-aged women across state borders for the purpose of prostitution. If convicted Dove can face as much as 25 years behind bars!

***SPOILERS*** Things really start to pick up when Dove refuses to be blackmailed by Jo and challenges her to go to the police knowing that her sleazy operation will be exposed to the public. This would lead Jo's paid off cops and politicians who let her get away with it now on the hot seat and, in order to save their necks, turning state evidence against her! In a last desperate attempt Jo together with her legless husband who lost his legs in a car accident Schmidt, Karl Swenson, in house enforcer Oliver, Richard Rust, who keeps the hookers in line and "Dockery, Don "Red" Barry, the "Doll House" bartender brutally work over Dove in order to make him change his mind!

All this backfires on Jo when her prime witness against Dove, in him violating the Mann Act, Kitty comes to his aid by refusing to testify against him. Wanting to make Dove pay for what he did to her, in taking Hallie away, Jo together with hubby Schmidt enforcer Oliver and bartender Dockery brake into Dove's living quarters at the Vidaverri Diner, where he works as a short order cook as well as all around handyman, still trying to get him to drop his idea of leaving for Texas along with Hallie! This time around Jo went a bit too far and in the end not only lost Hallie but her freedom as well with her whole operation shut down by the Federal authorities and the FBI. That's when Jo's former hooker employee Kitty, who finally realized what a vindictive rotten lowlife Jo really was, turned state's evidence against her thus being the one and only person making all that possible!

This hilariously awful film is right up there with old chestnuts like "Valley of the Dolls!" A complete winner in the guilty pleasure category, most of the players are ridiculously miscast,except for Stanwyck, who convinces as the tough, dominant lesbian madam. As with most fifties/sixties films, depictions of sexual situations are censored, or mooted at by dated, silly plot devices (ie, the lesbian relationship between Capucine, a glamorous whore and the tough Stanwyck is never made quite clear). The relationship between Fonda, a glamorous teen aged vagrant, and Harvey, a young Texas drifter is curiously lacking in sexual tension (this may be the actor's fault, as talent was never Mr. Harvey's thing). As a sympathetic Mexican cook, Anne Baxter comes off better, despite being bogged down by an obviously phony accent. In "Wild Side" we are asked to believe that young Harvey is smitten by a cold young French woman (absolutely woodenly played by the lovely Capucine) who has stumbled into a life of degradation. The man makes his way to the city to find her. Despite a drearily predictable plot, the beautiful black and white photography and a great music score compensate for the film's obvious failings. Having never read the book (yes, this was based on a book!) I understand that the script took some real liberties with the original material. If so, it would be interesting to see a remake. There's enough good lurid trashy fun here already-if this story were skillfully re-crafted, a new approach might kick the up the entertainment level another few notches.