The Wayward Bus Blu-ray Review
If it’s Tuesday, this must be—Fresno?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, June 6, 2012
John Steinbeck holds an extremely esteemed position in the hall of American Arts and Letters, but there's a perhaps
less
talked about accolade that also was visited on the author: quite a bit of the time, film adaptations of his pieces were
surprisingly well done, and at least a handful of them are considered classics to this day. While
The Grapes of
Wrath and
East of Eden are probably Steinbeck's best remembered properties in terms of their film
adaptations, a host of other works are at (or near) the same level of greatness, films as disparate as
Of Mice and
Men,
Lifeboat, The Red Pony and one of the few films where Steinbeck received an actual screenwriting credit,
Viva
Zapata!. Anyone who has ever witnessed the mangling of a great writer's work as it is fed through the meat
grinder
that is the movie making process should stop for just a moment and consider how rare it is that so many of Steinbeck's
pieces have made it so (relatively) unscathed through that process. No one would ever accuse
The Wayward
Bus of
being in the same league as
The Grapes of Wrath, or even of being "great" Steinbeck, and the novel is in fact
almost like a fictional travelogue, somewhat akin to Steinbeck's late slice of life novel
Travels With Charley. The
film throws a bunch of characters together on the titular bus and lets their various stories play out with an occasional
quasi-disaster movie cliché thrown in just for good measure. It's an odd little film, to be sure, and one that certainly
should hold a certain allure for audiences intrigued by the thought of a film that stars two female icons, Joan Collins and
Jayne Mansfield.
The fifties weren't an especially kind era to sexpots and glamour girls who wanted to prove they could act, all of whom
were more or less forced into prefab
molds of what the studios expected them to be (that trend of course being nothing new, stretching back to the dawn of
the cinema age). But something kind of interesting had happened the year before
The Wayward Bus came out
in
1957. 1956 saw the debut of the film version of William Inge's
Bus Stop, starring the inarguably biggest sexpot
and glamour girl of her time, Marilyn Monroe. And the
really shocking thing was, though Marilyn was indeed
sexy
and glamorous in the film, she actually gave an incredible performance, one that is usually noted as being probably the
finest (or at least one of the finest) of her rather short career. 20th Century Fox may have been looking for a similar
breakthrough role for another of its blonde bombshells, Miss Jayne Mansfield, and in that weird if predictable manner
that
Hollywood honchos sometimes utilize, they may have felt that a "bus" setting made that breakthrough all the more
likely.
Mansfield is on hand here as Camille Oakes, a burlesque performer trying to get out of her line of work and achieve
some
sort of middle class domestic respectability.
The commentary on
The Wayward Bus makes the interesting point that Steinbeck was aping Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales in a way, positing a bunch of disparate characters on a common journey to a religious shrine.
If things are at least a little bit more mundane here than they are in Chaucer, we do in fact have a bunch of passengers
who are all riding a rickety old bus nicknamed Sweetheart through the treacherous mountains and canyons of California
to the town of
San Juan, California. The bus is owned by Johnny Chicoy (Rick Jason), whose wife Alice (Joan Collins) runs the dusty
diner – bus stop in a little backwater where the only entertainment comes from the people passing through. This
particular day a typically diverse set of folks shows up to ride Sweetheart into the sunset. There's the local elderly man
(Will Wright), who keeps yelling about important business in San Juan that he needs to attend to by 3 p.m.; Alice's
waitress Norma (Betty Lou Keim), the latest in a long line of younger girls Alice has lost her temper with due to
jealousy;
and a dysfunctional middle class family consisting of husband (Larry Keating), wife (Kathryn Givney) and reportedly (by
the parents) sex crazed daughter (Dolores Michaels). Also along for the ride are a stripper named Camille (Mansfield),
obviously embarrassed by her lot in life, and a traveling salesman named Horton (Dan Dailey) who takes an immediate
interest in the girl.
Johnny and Alice have a big fight toward the beginning of the film when Johnny witnesses Alice literally attacking
counter girl Norma, and he leaves in a huff, telling her the marriage is over. That places the bulk of the film in the bus
itself, with occasional cutaways to Collins back at the restaurant, either getting sloshed or occasionally getting
"friendly" with the locals (that's Robert Bray as the helicopter pilot, an actor some television fans may remember from
one of the many iterations of the long running
Lassie television series). There's really not a lot to the plot of
The Wayward Bus other than character beats for most of the players. Will Johnny and Alice reconcile? Will
Horton and Camille find true love? Can the bickering elderly couple come to terms with each other and their amorous
daughter? Will Norma, who nurses dreams of Hollywood stardom, see her fantasy come true? And why is that old guy
so intent on getting to San Juan by 3 in the afternoon?
These little character bits are interwoven with a couple of set pieces that almost make
The Wayward Bus a
proto-disaster movie. First, the bus gets caught in a landslide. That slide closes the main road and so Johnny must
take an even more treacherous route via an old ranch road that is fraught with peril. Chief among the obstacles is a
rickety bridge that Johnny and his passengers attempt to cross at the height of a violent storm, with the creek
underneath swollen to frightening proportions. Later, the effects of the water play havoc with the bus' brakes. All of
these elements are handled well, if a bit hyperbolically, but they don't really add much to the actual plot development or
even provide much reason for any of the characters to do much of anything other than cringe in terror.
The Wayward Bus is really best experienced as a showcase of sorts for Collins and Mansfield. As the
commentary notes, Mansfield's character here is about the polar opposite of the giggly bimbos she played in
Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and
The Girl Can't Help It. She's nuanced, mature and really quite touching in
this role, and
The Wayward Bus proves she wasn't just another pretty face (and knockout body). Collins has a
somewhat tougher road to hoe here, and if she isn't completely convincing traversing Alice's admittedly wide emotional
arc, this is still a fascinating performance for an actress who at that point in her career was still seen, much like
Mansfield, as a sexpot puppet (witness
Land of the Pharoahs).
Director Victor Vicas inherited this project after it had been lying dormant for years around Fox (listen to the
commentary for some interesting tidbits on a variety of major talents who were attached to the project both in front of
and behind the camera through the years). He stages things very well for the Cinemascope lens, and he does elicit
some generally very fine performances from a cast that is saddled with a frankly pretty turgid script that, like the bus
riders themselves, is frequently all wet.
