A Centerfold Tragedy of Manners

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

STAR 80 Directed and Written by Bob Fosse

Hugh Hefner is distressed. He does not like his centerfolds to be married: it undermines their girl-next-door image. Besides, it is disruptive to the "family" atmosphere that he likes to believe pervades the mansion in Los Angeles. Hef surely has his self-delusions, but in this case he also has a point. Any would-be father figure might have his doubts about Dorothy Stratten's choice of a mate. Granted, it was Paul Snider who discovered her behind the Dairy Queen counter in Vancouver, B.C., sent the first crude nudes to Playboy's talent scouts and faked her mother's name on his underage protegee's release form. But gratitude must have its limits, and as the publisher says, Paul "has the personality of a pimp." To which Dorothy replies, in her flat, little girl's voice, "Oh, Mr. Hefner, that's just the way he used to dress."

This exchange is almost thrown away in Star 80, the terse, harrowing movie Bob Fosse has made to explain what finally led Snider to murder the one he loved (and kill himself as well). But the words pierce to the heart of the matter as the writer-director sees it. Everyone Dorothy Stratten meets wants to exploit her in some way. Yet in this peculiar moral universe, Fosse suggests, the differences between Hefner (played with slithery menace by Cliff Robertson), Snider and the upscale moviemaker (Roger Rees) who aspires to be her ultimate Pygmalion are more a matter of style than of principles.

That is why Dorothy's response is so unconsciously acute. She instinctively understands that what is developing around her is a tragedy of manners; Snider has read the bottom line shrewdly, but he has a blind eye and a tin ear for the social pieties, even the dress code, by which naked need and manipulative greed must be clothed for the sake of the respectability he desperately desires.

The force and originality in Fosse's recounting of a true story that has attracted much journalistic attention and has already been done as a TV movie (Death of a Centerfold) lie in the way he defeats one's conventional expectations of his material. Mariel Hemingway's Dorothy is not the tragic tart that custom usually dictates in works of this kind. In an arrestingly straightforward, naturalistic performance, Hemingway suggests neither portents of doom nor a sense that she is self-destructively abandoning herself to a media fairy tale from which the only possible awakening is a rude one. If her physical resemblance to Stratten is only approximate, her portrayal of an adolescent girl caught up, giggly and unaware, in the excitement of a surprise party that someone, mysteriously, decided to throw for her is fresh and touching. And one that, in effect, concedes the dramatic center of the film to Eric Roberts, who plays Snider, obviously the object of Fosse's appalled interest from the first. Given the hypnotic power of Roberts' complex performance as this unsympathetic victim, one finds oneself in cringing agreement with the director's emphasis.

Snider is a man in thrall to the power of the first impression. He is quick with flattery and small gifts. He studies himself in the mirror, practicing smooth self-introductions to strangers. He advises Dorothy to remember the name of everyone she meets for future flattering reference. With his absurd faith in such niceties, Snider puts one in mind of Willy Loman and his need to be well liked, particularly since that modern archetype also practiced his wiles in similarly unpromising venues. Snider's equivalent of the New England territory is the wet-T-shirt contest, the dream of multimillion-dollar sales for a Dorothy Stratten poster. There is, however, this huge difference between these figures: where Loman was damp with pathos, Snider burns with rage as he watches his discovery moving up and away from him. Seeing through the hypocrisy of those who build empires on sleaze, he cannot believe they will shut him out just because he wears snakeskin cowboy boots to their revels or drapes a prematurely friendly arm around Hef's shoulders.

But, of course, they will. Snider's rage, turned inward, becomes the depression out of which he kills the uncouth self that betrayed him, as well as the girl who never knew she was supposed to be not just his lover, meal ticket and wife but also his better self, source of the ultimate good first impression. It is a cold Q.E.D. for a chilling movie that opens with shots of freeway traffic hurtling past the murder site, Snider's pad, and closes with shots of Dorothy's intimates going about their mundane business while her naked body lies covered with blood. It is hard to remember an American movie that has, from first to last, done less to court an audience's indulgence. But it is also hard to remember a more ferociously moral movie. Or one that relies so exclusively on sheer directorial technique, the assurance of its cuts and angles, its settings and costumes, to carry that moral without resort to fine words or grand, distancing posturings.

From Cabaret to Lenny to All That Jazz, Fosse has been rummaging through the junk heaps of our culture, looking for artifacts to symbolize his bleak view of human nature. In the process he has stripped away his self-indulgences, and he emerges here as a masterly director in full possession of a terrible vision.

Very few people will "like" this film. But a few, one hopes, will see it for what it is: the year's most challenging and disturbing nightmare. --By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.