The Sterile Cuckoo Blu-ray Review
Cuckoo? Definitely. Sterile? Maybe not so much.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, September 28, 2012
There are some performers who are so intimately associated with one role that their entire careers seem to be summed
up by that one characterization. Such is probably the case for Liza Minnelli, at least for those who only know her from
her film work. Despite at least a duo (some would argue a trio) of really interesting performances early in her career,
Liza will forever "be" Sally Bowles of
Cabaret fame to most casual observers. Bob Fosse's rather radical
reinterpretation of the original Broadway version of the Kander and Ebb tuner put Minnelli on the public consciousness
map in a way few actresses have ever experienced, and once she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for that
role, it seemed like she was poised to become a major box office sensation, much as her mother Judy Garland was
decades earlier. That didn't happen for any number of reasons, including perhaps Minnelli's less than traditionally
glamorous appearance (something which her mother rather ironically had worried about with regard to herself back in
the thirties and forties, when she was on the Metro lot with such sirens as Lana Turner), her quirky performing style
and some dubious choices in follow up material. But Minnelli's pre-
Cabaret films are all quite unique and
appealing in their own way. All three of the films show Minnelli at her vulnerable, doe eyed best. In
Charlie
Bubbles, a 1967 opus co-starring (and directed by) Albert Finney and written by Shelagh Delaney (
A Taste of
Honey), Minnelli plays an innocent young secretary swept off her feet by a bored ultra-famous writer. In Otto
Preminger's
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, Minnelli portrays the title character, a valiant young woman
who has been horribly scarred in a domestic violence attack and who ends up cohabitating with two other outcasts
from society. Sandwiched between these two films came
The Sterile Cuckoo, a sweet if occasionally annoying
affair positing Minnelli as idiosyncratic Pookie Adams, a young teenager leaving home for her first year in college. As
she waits for the bus which will whisk her away from her small town which Pookie insists is full of "weirdos", she meets
uptight young biology student Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton) and immediately latches on to the hapless boy as her
lifeline away from home. The film continues to explore their developing relationship in a sort of bittersweet and
melancholic way, so redolent of late sixties and early seventies character based films.
Alan J. Pakula had a fascinating career in Hollywood as both a producer and a director. His long association with Robert
Mulligan resulted in such classics as
To Kill a Mockingbird and perhaps slightly lesser if still very well regarded films like
Up the Down Staircase and
Inside Daisy Clover (in all three of these films, Pakula produced and Mulligan
directed). While Pakula's later directing work is defined by such classics (or near classics) as
Sophie's Choice
and
All the President's
Men, some of his earliest pieces as helmsman reveal a quieter, gentler
ethos, and
The Sterile
Cuckoo, the first film in fact that Pakula both produced and directed is perhaps the best example of this more
introspective style. There's a wistful quality running through this film that is perfectly evoked by Fred Karlin's haunting
recorder-filled score, which includes the lovely Oscar nominated "Come Saturday Morning", featuring The Sandpipers
with their trademark unison vocalizing. (That year's Oscar race for Best Song was truly amazing, one of the last years
where at least four of
the five nominees achieved standard status in the intervening years since their nominations: "Raindrops Keep Fallin'
On My Head," the
eventual winner, from
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" from
The Happy
Ending; "Jean" from
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; "Come Saturday Morning" from this film; and "True Grit",
the one song that hasn't gone on to much of a post-awards shelf life,
from the John Wayne version of that outing.)
Minnelli is the unabashed highlight of this film, and she in fact received her only other Academy Award nomination (aside
from
Cabaret for this film. (She gave a very funny interview several years later which I remember reading. She
had evidently been injured in some sort of accident—I want to say it was a motorcycle crash, but I may be
misremembering—and was evidently stoned out of her mind on pain killers—this is according to her, mind you—at the
Oscar ceremony and apparently gave Maggie Smith a standing ovation when she won for
The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie.) Her Pookie is a sort of manic depressive character, one who verges on attention deficit disorder. Pookie
can't stop talking, she's about as "in your face" as you can get, but there's also an undeniable sweetness and fragility
about her which Minnelli conveys with near pitch perfection.
In what is essentially a three character drama, Wendell Burton is superb as Jerry (despite which his big screen career
never really took off after this debut performance). He does very well with Jerry's incipient embarrassment at having to
deal with Pookie, an embarrassment that slowly changes at least to lust if not outright love. Also very good is Tim
McIntire as Jerry's kind of typical frat boy loutish roommate.
The Sterile Cuckoo is an unapologetically "small" film, one built out of character beats instead of any huge plot
machinations (a pregnancy scare midway through aside). It's the kind of film that emerged from the major studios with
the influx of the independent spirit that began making itself a marketable commodity as the sixties gave way to the
seventies. That said, the characters here are resolutely old fashioned, hardly the student radicals that were then
holding campuses hostage in sit-ins and similar sociopolitical tantrums. However, there's a simplicity to this film that is
quite refreshing, an honesty of emotion that doesn't resort to
histrionics (at least for the most part) but instead tugs gently at the heartstrings as it explores two awkward teens
attempting to find their footing
in an increasingly complex adult world, ultimately coming to the conclusion that need doesn't necessarily translate into
true love. It's a life journey most of us have traversed ourselves, and
The Sterile
Cuckoo is like leafing through a scrapbook of perhaps slightly unsettling and uncomfortable memories.
