Susan Anspach Movies
Offbeat leading lady Susan Anspach worked in off-Broadway productions before making her first film, The Landlord, in 1970. Nominal stardom came her way with prime roles in Five Easy Pieces (1971), Play It Again, Sam (1972), and especially Blume in Love (1973). The type of fey, semi-neurotic roles that made Anspach famous went out of vogue as the 1970s became the 1980s, and her career suffered accordingly. She continued to appear in smaller-scale films like Blue Monkey (1987) and Killer Instinct (1990), and was a regular on three TV series: The Yellow Rose (1983), Space (1985), and The Slap Maxwell Story (1987). In 1995, Susan Anspach found herself in the tabloids and columns when she sued her former lover Jack Nicholson over a long-standing monetary arrangement. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1976
In this drama, a college president takes a sabbatical so he can work as a ditch-digger and a cafe cook. The story is based on John Chapman's autobiographical book, Blue Collar Journal. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1976
I Want to Keep My Baby is a cautionary TV movie starring Mariel Hemingway as a pregnant 15-year-old girl. She is pressured by her mother (Susan Anspach) to keep her baby, despite the warnings of a social worker (Rhea Perlman) that the girl is emotionally and financially unable to care for the child. Taking a defiant attitude, Hemingway insists upon setting herself up as a single parent. It is only after a few harrowing months of unassisted motherhood--and a brief temper flare-up in which Hemingway comes dangerously close to injuring her child--that the girl bows to logic and puts the baby up for adoption. I Want to Keep My Baby would have been more effective without such melodramatic setpieces as a rape attempt and a chance encounter between the girl and a pair of adoptive parents. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
In the Los Angeles of yoga, therapy, and well-off liberals, a divorcé decides that his ex-wife is the love of his life in Paul Mazursky's romantic comedy. Beverly Hills divorce lawyer Stephen Blume (George Segal) becomes his own client when his social worker wife Nina (Susan Anspach) throws him out for sleeping with his secretary. Only then does Blume realize that he can't live without Nina, even though she seems fine without him, and he has a new sex partner in divorcée Arlene (Marsha Mason). So what does he do to win Nina back? Befriend her laid-back musician beau, Elmo (Kris Kristofferson), show up at her house with breakfast bagels, eavesdrop on her therapy sessions, and forcibly impregnate her, of course. Banished to their former honeymoon site in Venice, Italy while Nina thinks things over, Blume reflects on his past and his obsession, as he dreamily hopes for the best. Cutting between Blume's musings on love and loss in Venice's Piazza San Marco and the events in L.A. that brought him there, Mazursky humorously yet sharply dissects the complications of marriage in the let-it-all-hang-out Me Decade of the 1970s. Blume and Nina face the same dilemma as the couples in Mazursky's 1969 hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice: how to mesh traditional vows with the new freedom and its temptations. In this case, it takes a divorce to convince the solipsistic Blume that the woman he wants most is his own wife. Considered by some critics one of the decade's best interrogations of contemporary coupledom, Blume in Love astutely captured the absurdity of Blume's self-involved romantic quest, while slyly celebrating the operatic spirit of love that drives him. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- George Segal, Susan Anspach, (more)
Herbert Ross directed this adaptation of Woody Allen's hit Broadway play concerning a shy film critic who has trouble with women. Woody Allen plays Allan Felix, a writer for Film Quarterly consumed by movies, particularly his favorite film of all time, Casablanca. At the start of the film, Allan's wife Nancy (Susan Anspach) has just left him and is applying for a divorce. Unable to deal with this emotional turmoil, Allan seeks solace in the movies he loves, imagining Humphrey Bogart (Jerry Lacy) has dropped by his apartment to offer Allan advice on dealing with the ladies ("Dames are simple. I never met one that didn't understand a slap in the mouth or a slug from a forty-five"). Helping Allan meet new women are his good friends Dick (Tony Roberts) and Linda Christie (Diane Keaton). Dick and Linda fix him up with a succession of dates, all of which end disastrously because of Allan's nervousness and insecurity. Finally, Allan realizes that he has been spending more time with Linda than anyone else and he is becoming attracted to her -- she's the only woman he truly feels comfortable around. Linda proves unexpectedly receptive to Allan's advances, since Dick's workaholic ways leave Linda neglected and ignored. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, (more)
- 1970
- PG
Wealthy, insensitive young Beau Bridges buys an inner-city tenement, planning to evict the present occupants and construct a luxury home for himself. But once he ventures into the tenement, he grows quite fond of the low-income ethnic types who dwell within. He even kicks over the traces of his WASP upbringing by romancing black tenants Diana Sands and Marki Bey. Though essentially a comedy, The Landlord offers several painful truths about ghetto existence. Essentially, Beau Bridges acts as the audience's "eyes:" we learn as he learns, we grow as he grows. The Landlord represents the first directorial effort of Oscar-winning film editor Hal Ashby. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, (more)
A disaffected man seeks a sense of identity in one of the key films of Hollywood's 1970s New Wave. Once a promising pianist from a family of classical musicians, Bobby Eroica Dupea (Jack Nicholson, in his first major starring role) leads a blue-collar life as an oil rigger, living with needy waitress girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) and bowling with their friends Elton (Billy "Green" Bush) and Stoney (Fannie Flagg). Feeling suffocated by responsibilities, Bobby seeks out his sister, Tita (Lois Smith), and, discovering that his father is gravely ill, he reluctantly heads back to the patrician family compound in Puget Sound with a pregnant Rayette in tow. After a road trip featuring a harangue from hitchhiker Palm (Helena Kallianiotes) about filth, and Bobby's ill-fated attempt to make a menu substitution in a diner, he tucks Rayette away in a motel before heading to the house. There Bobby seduces his uptight brother Carl's cultured fiancée, Catherine (Susan Anspach), but Rayette shows up unexpectedly. As Rayette's crassness collides with the snobbery of the Dupea circle, Bobby loses patience with both sides. After trying to reconcile with his mute father, Bobby departs, unwilling to give in to either destiny. Director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter Adrien Joyce (aka Carole Eastman) used the creative control afforded by the low budget to craft a European-influenced character study, catching a cultural mood of anomie and resentment as it was embodied in Bobby. Neither older generation nor hippie, Bobby fits in nowhere, and his desire for independence conflicts with his emotional emptiness. Nicholson's nuanced performance of simmering frustration resonated with 1970 audiences caught between Nixon's "silent majority" and the troubled counterculture; a substantial hit, Five Easy Pieces was nominated for several Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, and established Nicholson as a star. Offering no "easy" answers to Bobby's existential crisis, Five Easy Pieces is one of the pre-eminent films in the early-'70s cycle of alienated American art movies, as even the fantasy of rebellion is reduced to merely running away. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, (more)
- 1968
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This odd film was shot in 1967 but wasn't released until 1991. The reality of the production is quite amazing. The director, who up until then had only filmed documentaries, decided that he wanted to provoke his actors and crew beyond their level of tolerance so that they would in some fashion hijack his production. Ostensibly, they are filming an arty story called "Over the Cliff," which shows the same scene of a split between husband and wife as played by five different couples from a variety of different angles. Eventually the (secretly anticipated) revolt does happen, and the cast and crew film their late-night sessions in which they discuss what can be done to save the movie. Their uncensored and quite intelligent comments were then included in the completed film along with the footage of the continuing saga of the endlessly filmed marital break-up. While the set-up is nothing like that of the contemporaneous television show Candid Camera, reviewers professed discomfort in viewing the cold manipulations which led to the desired result. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows, (more)
In 1966, a year before he rose to overnight fame in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman won an Obie Award for his performance in Journey of the Fifth Horse, a stage adaptation by Ronald Ribman of the story Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev. The play was videotaped for public television that same year, and this home video release presents a recording of one of Hoffman's first truly great roles. Dmitri Zoditch (Dustin Hoffman) is a lower-level manuscript reader for a large publishing company, and while he's in love with the daughter (Susan Anspach) of the firm's deceased founder, he lacks the courage to court her. The diary of a second-rate nobleman who has fallen on hard times, Nikolai Alexeyevich Chulkaturin (Michael Tolan), has been submitted for publication, and the manuscript is given to Zoditch for appraisal. Told he must read the work in one night, Zoditch soon finds himself drawn into the world of the bitter Chulkaturin, whose angst is a compliment for the insignificance of Zoditch's own life. Charlotte Rae also co-stars. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
