An Almost Perfect Affair (1979)

Bronson cries! That alone is worth a million bucks!

When Michael Ritchie attended the Venice Film Festival in 1972 to promote The Candidate, he came away exhausted and culture shocked, and he wasn’t the only one: George Lucas had stories of his own about his sojourn to Cannes in 1971 with his then-flop THX 1138. Cannes turned out to be a major break for twenty-seven-year-old Lucas when THX 1138 was given a spot in the Directors’ Fortnight to great success. For Ritchie, it was the germ of an interesting story: a young American filmmaker brings his arty debut picture to a European festival and encounters both the weirdness of the international film business as well as (potentially) his own shortcomings. Ritchie developed the idea further, burning through writers Don Petersen, Steve Tesich,¹ and finally Walter Bernstein (who had just written Semi-Tough) and Cannes Game was born.

Thanks to the commercial success of The Bad News Bears and Semi-Tough, Ritchie had some bargaining power with Paramount, who agreed script approval and final cut. In exchange, Ritchie agreed to direct the picture for scale. Adopting his usual documentary-like process, Ritchie decamped to Cannes in 1978 to grab second unit footage of the festival in action: “I had a fine French crew prowling the Croisette for a week, carefully shooting the good, the bad, and the ugly so that they could be interacting with the film’s main fictional characters when principal photography began several months later.” He also happened to score his leading man, Keith Carradine, who was knocking around, promoting the Palme d’Or-nominated Pretty Baby. Carradine was sufficiently impressed by Ritchie to agree to the film, even though the screenplay had yet to be written. Later, Ritchie would persuade Monica Vitti to play the leading lady, despite her shaky grasp of the English language, while Bernstein set about retooling the script to fit the new cast.

If Ritchie’s previous trip to Europe had been eye-opening, Cannes was even more so. For him, it was a marketplace of ideas rather than finished movies: “The real business of Cannes is not awards, or even the screening of finished pictures for broader distribution deals. The business of Cannes is done with smoke and mirrors. It’s about securing the bucks, francs and Deutschmarks for films you hope to make by convincing everybody that you’re closer to making it than you really are … Do not confuse the marketplace at Cannes with other film marketplaces. This is the place where the two characters of Mel Brooks’ The Producers might indeed have sold off more than 100% of ownership in a film.” Ritchie became particularly interested in producer Mel Simon, “a supermarket zillionaire from Indianapolis,” who “controlled most of the billboard space in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel.” Simon was doing the rounds with the Cannes belle of the ball Farrah Fawcett, then blisteringly hot off the success of Charlie’s Angels and promoting the Simon-produced crime comedy Somebody Killed Her Husband.² He also happened to be promoting a bunch of posters for as-yet unmade pictures, which Ritchie – ever the savvy dealmaker – bought for storage, so they’d have a backdrop for principal photography: “Mel Simon’s make-believe movies – his Westerns, his gangster films and his romantic tearjerkers – would live again, at least as background posters in our movie.”

An Almost Perfect Affair (presumably Cannes Game was too esoteric a title, and a pun that doesn’t really work unless you’re American) follows Hal Raymond (Carradine), a young filmmaker who arrives in Cannes with his debut movie Choice of Ending, a grim and gritty “non-fiction” story based on Gary Gilmore,³ the double murderer who demanded his own execution by firing squad. This being très bureaucratique France, the film is immediately confiscated by customs, which prompts Hal to have a wee hissy fit. Luckily, he meets Maria Barone (Vitti), the wife of Italian film producer Freddie Barone (Raf Vallone), who agrees to help him retrieve his movie. Hal and Maria end up falling in (a kind of) love and engaging in the titular affair, before an argument over Hal’s movie – now retitled Shoot Me Before I Kill Again by his exploitation movie multi-hyphenate pal Andrew Jackson⁴ – tears them apart. What follows is a brief dialogue about the importance of movies over people, some mild abduction shenanigans, and a final reconciliation between Maria and her sad-eyed husband.

And that’s about it. It’s a pretty flimsy excuse for a plot, but that never really matters when it comes to romantic movies. The key thing is the chemistry of the leads, especially in this case, where both Hal and Maria have significant others. It’s one thing to fall in love; it’s quite another to cheat on an established partner. If the chemistry is strong – if we truly believe that these people belong together – then it can work. If not, then say au revoir to any audience sympathy.

Hélas, Carradine and Vitti are not a dynamic couple. Carradine is a fine actor, but not an immediately sympathetic one: his best performances have usually been as a callow youth (Emperor of the North Pole) or womanising rake (Nashville). On paper, Hal Raymond is a little of both, if the two character types had been seasoned with a heavy dose of insufferable. His Hal is the kind of guy who clicks for waiters, gets angry rather than frustrated at cultural differences, and who is so utterly self-serious that he has the temerity to cite both Samuel Fuller and Edgar G. Ulmer (“the early Edgar Ulmer”) as references to his 16mm magnum opus. Such a character demands a caddish charm that Carradine doesn’t quite possess, so he ends up coming across as the kind of guy you’re quite happy to see chewed up and spat out by the industry, if not kicked to death in an alley.⁵

As for Vitti, she has her moments. When she’s not choking on the English language – despite the on-set dialogue coach, Vitti was always uncomfortable with English – she can be a treat, communicating more ennui with a look than any amount of dialogue and positively sparking when she’s allowed to play up the laughs (a casino scene is particularly fun and lets her go wild for a moment). But she needs someone to play off, someone just as adept at self-deprecating comedy and as good at playing the insecurity and remorse that go hand in hand with infidelity, and Carradine isn’t it.

Complicating matters further is the presence of Raf Vallone. For those who don’t know, Vallone was a footballer (the real kind) turned leading man, playing against Anna Magnani (Red Shirts) and Sophia Loren (Two Women). He was also an accomplished stage actor who played Eddie Carbone in Peter Brook’s staging of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 1958 before he took the performance to the screen in Sidney Lumet’s 1962 film adaptation.⁶ Why am I telling you this? Because he’s by far the best thing in An Almost Perfect Affair. His Freddie Barone is ostensibly an Italian version of Mel Simon, but he’s closer in performance to someone like Dino de Laurentiis, a producer involved in everything from La Strada (1954) to Evil Dead II (1987). Barone is a man dismissed by Hal as purveyor of crowd-pleasers, but Vallone plays him as a consummate creative producer, just as heartbroken about a breakdown in relationship with a director as he is absolutely intent on having Charles Bronson play Stanley Kowalski (opposite “Vanessa” – I assume Redgrave - as “Vivien Leigh”).⁷ He may lack sophistication, but he’s mature enough to handle his wife’s affair with dignity and he – unlike Hal – appears to place the art of moviemaking above his own ego. And it’s no exaggeration to say that the most affectionate scenes are not between Hal and Maria but Freddie and Maria: he prevents his idiotic offspring from accompanying Maria to Paris (or rather, a tryst with Hal) when she reluctantly agrees to take them; he responds to her return after an all-nighter with a simple “welcome home;” and his reaction to her final assertion that “for me, you have no age,” is lovely. He’s also more fun to be around, particularly compared to the self-obsessed Hal.

So we have a love triangle that doesn’t really work, but that doesn’t scupper the film entirely. The fun of An Almost Perfect Affair lies in the moments directly inspired by Ritchie’s encounters at Cannes. While we don’t meet the “rich Cote d’Azur property owner who just liked to sell sunglasses every year during the festival”⁸ we do get a detailed, somewhat gaudy documentary look at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, complete with unwitting cameos from Sergio Leone, Monte Hellman, Paul Mazursky, Brooke Shields, George Peppard, and some terribly unfortunate old lady who’s more plaster cast than woman. We eavesdrop on former Mrs Russ Meyer Edy Williams as she describes her movie idea – “Here’s the treatment that I wrote. It’s very easy to read.” – to a clearly ambivalent Roger Ebert, who points out that her poster is the same as the one she was flashing the previous year. We witness gossip columnist extraordinaire Rona Barrett fall on her arse trying to navigate a handful of steps. And we get a lingering look at the tackiness of the entire endeavour, otherwise hidden behind the glamour of one of the most prestigious film awards in Europe.

And this is the most frustrating thing about An Almost Perfect Affair – it has the elements of a prime Ritchie movie, a gentle satire on the European film festival circuit sprinkled with documentary footage and bolstered by some excellent comic performances. Outside of Vallone, the best is Dick Anthony Williams as Andrew Jackson, parlaying his previous roles as “Pretty Tony” in The Mack (1973) and Joe Creole in Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (1973) into a business-savvy producer-writer-director-star of an exploitation picture with a title no white man in his right mind would even write down.⁹ He has arguably the best lines in the movie and knows how to deliver them, whether it’s bugging Hal about not being commercial enough, chasing the only Black woman in Cannes (who is pretending to be Algerian), turning a submerged Citroen into a marketing ploy, or demanding a sixty-forty split on a film deal with the addition of “just think of it as making up for two hundred years of slavery.” Had An Almost Perfect Affair stuck to Ritchie’s forte, it might have been a classic in the vein of Smile; unfortunately, it’s saddled with an unconvincing romantic plot that threatens to make a ninety-minute movie feel like six hours.

It wouldn’t be a Michael Ritchie movie if the reviews weren’t mixed. Some critics like Janet Maslin praised the “winning” romance at the heart of the film and dismissed the Cannes backdrop as little more than “a landscape riddled with billboards and heads.” Others, like Frank Rich, bemoaned the “high-toned soap opera” of the central romance and noted “Raf Vallone is so appealing that it is hard to know why Vitti would forsake him. Whether he is arguing on the phone about Burmese distribution rights or comforting his wife in a time of need, the serpentine Vallone is a grand old charmer.” Indeed, the only agreement was that An Almost Perfect Affair was a missed opportunity; the only disagreement lay in which opportunity had been missed.

Further hampering the movie’s prospects at the box office was a belligerent MPAA, who refused to grant a PG rating (apparently they took exception to “sexually derived expletives”), Vitti’s refusal to publicise the film in the United States due a pathological fear of flying,¹⁰ the perpetual questions for Ritchie about how much of the film was based on personal experience (answer: none of it), and Paramount’s reluctant release of the film into only three cities. “It wasn’t that they went to see it and hated it,” said Ritchie. “They didn’t even go to see it on the first day.” Ritchie believed that Paramount’s abandonment of An Almost Perfect Affair had something to do with their release of Robert Altman’s vaguely similar slump-era movie A Perfect Couple three weeks earlier, but it’s likely the age-old case of a studio ceding creative control and enthusiasm at the same time.

The director wouldn’t make the same mistake again; he had new mistakes to make. Ritchie’s next film would be an adaptation of a novel by one of the most successful authors of the ‘70s, one whose previous novels had not only inspired one of the greatest movies of all time and a lucrative franchise, but also a recent $100m hit for Peter Yates. With Michael Caine and David Warner in the movie (not to mention a supporting cast of TV character faces) and a script by the author himself, what could possibly go wrong? Find out next week, when we wrap up Ritchie Season in style.

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Next Up: “This summer the most terrifying thing in the water is …”

1. Petersen was the writer of Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, a play which I find myself referencing a lot these days, mostly because it was the Broadway debut of Al Pacino and directed by Michael Schultz (Car Wash). Tesich was also a playwright, whose best known screen work is probably Breaking Away (1979) or the film adaptation of John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1982). Bernstein will be known to both regular readers of this here ‘stack as the screenwriter of The Front (1976) and the aforementioned Semi-Tough.

2. Mel Simon would also go on to produce George Hamilton comedies (I use this term loosely) Love at First Bite (1979) and Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981), babysitter-in-peril thriller When a Stranger Calls (1979), Richard Rush oddity The Stunt Man (1980) and all three Porky’s movies. That said, I’m now more interested in seeking out Somebody Killed Her Husband - surely Fawcett and Jeff Bridges in an Edgar-nominated Reginald Rose script can’t be all bad?

3. In my head, it’s some godawful pseudo-adaptation of Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.

4. I can only assume naming the only Black guy after a - shall we say - controversial president was a joke.

5. He also fucks up a semi-decent running gag with the French customs officer declaring that “this isn’t a nation of thieves/snoops/liars” by throwing away the pay-off, “We’re not a nation of schmucks.” Taxi for Carradine.

6. He also played future Pope Cardinal Lamberto in The Godfather Part III (1990). I think he’s great, if you didn’t already notice. But then I love a Marxist face.

7. Not gonna lie, I would watch ‘70s Bronson and Redgrave in Streetcar. And again, at least Barone recognises that Tennessee Williams is a class act.

8. Who also apparently tried to invest in the fictional Shoot Me Before I Kill Again.

9. What, you expected me to put it in a footnote? Shame on you.

10. Paramount apparently agreed to fund her passage on a ship and subsequent train journeys, but no dice.