Now that The Kids of New Grenada have a martyr to the cause of badly needing something to do, they get organized. The movie becomes a wish-fulfilment fantasy for everyone who has ever felt mistreated and ignored as a teenager, as they barricade all the town’s most prominent adults into the school – where they are, of course, discussing the teen problem without actually inviting any teens – and riot, setting fire to cars, and generally going mindless and feral. In the midst of this there is a neatly ironic scene where Julia, who had attempted to talk sense about the problem to the assembled adults before being rudely interrupted by stuff blowing up, uses the fact that she’s the only adult the kids trust to persuade one of the younger riot boys to go get her a phone. She may be the liberal therapist. But she still snitches the kids out to the cops when it comes to the crunch.
The movie ends with explosive revenge on Doberman, and a blunt refusal on Kaplan’s part to teach these kids a valuable lesson. As the riot’s ringleaders are taken off to face court and possible prison, they look cool and defiant, and are given a hero’s send-off by the resistance fighters – sorry – bored children they leave behind. They look pretty happy. After all, how bad can jail be after New Grenada?
1980s
LITTLE DARLINGS
1980
Starring: Kristy McNichol, Tatum O’Neal, Matt Dillon, Armand Assante, Krista Errickson
Dir.: Ronald F. Maxwell
Plot: Trailer-trash heroine and snotty rich bitch race to lose their virginity. Valuable lessons learned.
Key line: ‘Virgins are weird, right?’
The makers of this provocative coming-of-age drama entirely understand what they have in one Kristy McNichol.
The opening shot is of a light blue quilt, presumably hanging on a washing line. It’s simply a nicely colour-coded backdrop for the entry of McNichol, from stage right. And you swoon, and maybe gasp, and possibly drool a bit.
She’s in half-body close-up, and you take in the shaggy, flick-back mullet, the black t-shirt, the denim jacket, the wiry body and an extraordinary face that seems to have been designed to show off the most beautiful things about both boys and girls. Her eyes are feminine, big, knowing, questioning, amused, vulnerable. But her mouth is tough, pouting, sneery, macho, set within a strong jaw. As she watches something we can’t see – something that could be worrying, although she could just be playing up those big eyes because she knows we’re watching her – she slouches a little, pulls a fag from a pack of Marlboros, sparks up, takes a breath, and begins to strut towards this worrying place. You see just how thin and androgynous her body is. A boy wolf-whistles, laughs, and runs up to her to run his lines. He is spoiling the view, and the film-makers know it. We just want to watch this cross-gender amalgam of every teen rebel hero and heroine walk, and want to tell the git to fuck off on her behalf. No need. ‘Slide me somethin’ nice,’ the asshole demands. She smiles – I swear, violins play and tweety birds start fluttering around your head – and kicks him in the balls. I mean Wayne-Rooney-volley kicks him in the balls. She stands over him like Muhammad Ali looming over a prone Sonny Liston.
Another couple of lads, who should be natural allies of our hapless victim of feminist justice, laugh uproariously on our behalf. And fair enough. How could you not be on this girl’s side?
Little Darlings takes its thematic cue from that other great teen chick flick, Where The Boys Are (see here). It’s a comedy-drama with a strangely gooberish pop soundtrack (Blondie? Of course. But John Lennon, Rickie Lee Jones and Supertramp?) about how, why and when a girl should lose her virginity, set in a summer camp in Georgia. The version released for US TV was censored to make it appear that our two central protagonists, Ferris (O’Neal) and Angel (McNichol), were engaged in a bet to see which one could make a boy fall in love with them. For once, one can understand the anxiety of broadcasters when dealing with viewing parents in the less liberal corners of America. Because these girls are only 15.
I had absolutely no knowledge of this movie until it was recommended to me for the book by a female friend. Not only did she big it up, but insisted that Little Darlings was a vital coming-of-age touchstone for her. My friend, incidentally, is gay, but didn’t discover her sexuality until well into her twenties. I watched the movie with that in mind, and, by the time it reached its uplifting conclusion, got precisely what it had said to my friend without being explicit about it, and why it had resonated for her without her fully understanding why.
But the big feminist themes of the movie work despite the world of difference between its two leads. Put simply, Kristy McNichol is stunningly good, and Tatum O’Neal is achingly bad. And it’s difficult not to project their real lives on to their Little Darlings characters, and imagine that some kind of on-set competition between opposites worked in the movie’s favour.
Tatum O’Neal plays spoiled rich princess Ferris. In real life, Ms O’Neal was to the Hollywood manor born. Daughter of Ryan O’Neal, one of the biggest Hollywood box office stars of the early ’70s, she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1974 for her role as a con artist opposite her father in Peter Bogdanovich’s (see The Last Picture Show, here) depression-era comedy Paper Moon. She was 10.
She had further commercial hits with The Bad News Bears and International Velvet, but Little Darlings turned out to be the end of her imperial phase, largely because, at 16, she still acted like an annoying 10-year-old. In 1986 she virtually quit acting to marry temperamental tennis icon John McEnroe. Divorce inevitably followed stormy marriage, and she never regained her place at acting’s top table. But in 2011 her public soap opera life was enough to bag her a Oprah Winfrey-sponsored reality TV show, Ryan And Tatum: The O’Neals, about the father and daughter’s attempts to reconcile after barely speaking for 25 years.
Kristy McNichol plays working-class tough girl Angel. In real life, she and her brother Jimmy had formed a kind of childhood double-act, working their way up through adverts and small TV parts. She got her big break in 1976 when cast as one of the stars of a US TV drama called Family alongside the likes of Michael J. Fox and Helen Hunt. But in 1978 she and brother Jimmy made a pop album which was launched at New York’s notorious Studio 54 disco. It bombed.
Her career peaked with Little Darlings. By the time she was 20 – in 1982 – it was downhill all the way. When she disappeared from the set of a movie called Just The Way You Are – which also bombed – rumours circulated around the industry that she was a drug casualty. No one wanted to risk hiring her.
She got another break in 1988 when cast in hit TV sitcom Empty Nest, a spin-off from The Golden Girls. But, again, she went AWOL on set. In 1992, both she and brother Jimmy were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. By the end of the ’90s she had completely retired from show business. She teaches acting and does charity work in LA, and was last spotted as the butt of two jokes on Family Guy.
Can’t help thinking that telling those two stories as parallel epics about the price of child stardom would make one motherfucker of a great movie. Anyone got Oprah’s number?
Anyway . . . what I’m saying is that there is an interesting onscreen contrast between the girl who worked her way up through her talent, and the girl that, well, didn’t. And that adds a little more edge to a movie that manages to be great despite some of the lousiest direction this side of Michael Winner.
The tale begins with a bunch of girls boarding a yellow bus to summer camp. Angel already appears to be an outcast, because her mother drove up in a noisy, battered car, and because she looks like working-class trouble. We immediately know that we’re not just here for the campfire songs and hymn-singing when we eavesdrop on a conversation about movies between a few of the girls as the bus waits to leave. When one says she’s seen Grease six times, an unseen voice bigs up, of all things, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast, before a loud brunette trumps them by boasting about her repeated viewings of Last Tango In Paris. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 Marlon Brando vehicle may have been intended as an intellectual study of lov
eless sex, but in 1980 it was still viewed as arty, shocking porn, as natural a byword for illicit screen titillation as Deep Throat or Emmanuelle. These Georgia girls appear to be somewhat mature and obsessed with rumpy-pumpy.
Little rich girl Ferris arrives late and in an extraordinary white pant-suit complete with cap. She is as immediately outcast as Angel because she is ostentatiously rich. Within minutes Angel and Ferris are having full-on class-war fisticuffs, minus girly screaming and hair-pulling, egged on by the other girls, who appear to be as entertained by violence as teenage boys.
The most crucial update that Little Darlings makes on the world of Where The Boys Are is in the arena of perceived differences in behaviour between teen boys and teen girls. There aren’t any. To hammer the point home, there is a scene where the girls watch a bunch of boys skinny-dipping through binoculars, making the same sort of sexist quips as any other group of cinematic peeping Toms. Except Angel, who seems . . . uninterested. We’ll get back to that shortly.
Our little darlings are entertainingly weird. One girl called Sunshine – played by 14-year-old Cynthia Nixon of future Sex And The City fame – is a dippy hippy who wears a crown of flowers and feeds everyone drugs . . . in the shape of vitamin tablets and ginseng. Another, Penelope, is a pug-faced tomboy in a girl guide uniform who stuffs hankies in her bra to try and appear like she has bazongas so she doesn’t have to camp with her fellow pre-teens. And most of them boast about sex like locker-room Lotharios. Having identified Angel and Ferris as different and willing to compete with each other to be accepted, the group proceeds to bully them into admitting that they are virgins and making a bet as to which one can pop their cherry first. Cinder (Krista Errickson), a vain diva who fancies herself as a supermodel and woman of the world, is the requisite Mean Girl who appears to have missed the memo which insists that promiscuous girl equals slut: ‘Two little virgins. Quaint! No wonder you’re always fighting. It’s all that unreleased energy. Probably lezzies.’
Now, I think we’re probably all aware, in this day and age, that 15-year-old girls are precocious enough to talk to each other this way. But, in 1980, on film, we weren’t. What makes the exchange somewhat shocking is that, in spite of the fruity language and earthy eccentricity of the characters, Little Darlings is shot like a children’s film; all pretty colours, corny montage, clumsy over-emphasis and terrible, bland, incidental muzak. It’s like someone suddenly mentioning clitoral orgasms in a Disney movie.
But we didn’t really need the ‘L’ word to read the subtext. We’ve watched Angel dispatch a male threat with utter confidence. But the camera lingers on McNichol’s face as Cinder taunts her, and she’s like a rabbit caught in headlights. She doesn’t seem scared of Cinder, nor even that intimidated by peer pressure. She seems in awe of her, as if a boy she had a crush on had decided to publicly humiliate her. That, taken with her ‘Boys are a pain in the ass’ defence, gives Little Darlings the feel of a secret gay movie without ever letting its female characters articulate any kind of mutual attraction.
Despite this uncomfortable start, and the bet, life at Camp Little Wolf does settle into female bonding rituals fairly quickly. They muck about on boats, play sports, quote Shakespeare, cheek their elders, have a sexy food fight in the canteen – Ferris makes milk explode over Angel’s bejeaned crotch in a manner that might make Brando in The Wild One (see here) feel inadequate – and hijack a bus to go into town and steal condoms from a men’s toilet. Normal kids’ stuff. But it’s all padding, really, for the impending Shag-Off. Most of the conversation is clever, funny stuff about the myths around sex among teens who haven’t had any yet. And, if the dialogue here is anything to go by, it’s illuminating to know that confused but horny girls talk much of the same bollocks as confused but horny boys.
Having already risked a few taboos, screenwriters Kimi Peck and Dalene Young decide to go gung-ho. While Angel hangs her hopes of victory on Matt Dillon’s predictable motorbikin’ Ramone-alike Randy (not everything’s subtle) from the neighbouring boys’ camp, Ferris sets her white cap at Mr Callahan, the thirtysomething camp counsellor and moonlighting French teacher. And when your star is Armand Assante, no amount of naming him Gary, dressing him in t-shirts and making him do sporty activities can stop him looking like a Monte Carlo gigolo from Latin Lounge Lizards Inc.
So, we’re now being asked to enjoy watching a sullen brat manipulate a sleazy youth worker into paedophilia. Quaint!
The idea that this world is some sort of female conspiracy against men is established in even the smallest scenes. In one, parents visit a couple of the less visible girls. While Dad asks them inane questions, Mom is looking through their drawers. She discovers a pile of condoms and gasps with horror. But, when Dad innocently asks if the girls are being neat, Mom keeps him out of the loop, and the scene moves swiftly on, as if the entire point of the scene’s inclusion was to illuminate male naivety and place gender solidarity even before marriage and parenthood.
The question of whether Angel is independent woman or surrogate man also hovers around the movie. When she makes up her mind to get Randy, she rows out alone in a boat to where he and all his skinny-dipping pals are sitting, utterly fearless, and almost whistles him like a dog. I mean, there’s confidence and there are things that no 15-year-old girl would have the bottle to actually do. If she was a superhero, Angel would be Men-don’t-scare-me Girl; lousy name, great pre-Buffy Summers ball-kicking powers. She chain smokes, drinks beer, can make excellent mating bird noises, has this glittering smile . . . look, I’m not a pervert, OK? I was 17 when this came out, so I’m just . . . projecting backwards. In time. Gimme a break.
So her mix of assertiveness and realistic target looks to have won Angel the bet. But we know pretty quickly that she and Randy’s night-time tryst isn’t quite right. A storm thunders. The barn they row out to is all abandoned and creepy. She’s reluctant to kiss him, and even wants him to turn around while she gets naked. Angel is confident about men. But she’s just not ready for sex. At least, not in this perfunctory, functional way, with a guy who is just too dumb to pick up on her reluctance. McNichol is great in this scene, vulnerable without being weak, her suppressed panic a powerful reminder of how awful it feels to feel you have to go through with something painful in order to save face. Her boyishness lends another layer of oddness to the scene, especially when you notice that she and the macho Dillon could almost be brother and sister.
When Angel’s attempts to delay the happy event finally exhaust Randy’s patience, and he rejects her, she tries to talk him back into it. She’s just too young to know what she wants, and this asshole is too young to be a patient seducer, or admit that he has feelings. ‘I’m not sexy to you, huh?’ she asks. ‘All girls are sexy,’ he grunts, and her face is a mask of humiliation. Or is it agreement?
Still, it could be worse. Ferris is depressed because her parents are getting divorced, and the object of her lust is singing that terrible folk song about cherries that have no stones or whatever around a campfire in the kind of preppy choirboy voice that makes you want to go completely Bluto (see National Lampoon’s Animal House, here). Nevertheless, Ferris turns up at Gary’s cabin in a nightie. As his chintzy classical soundtrack, white socks and rug-like chest hair don’t send her running for the hills of eternal celibacy, we assume that losing her virginity has become some sort of abstract concept now, like a quest, or maybe a cosmic assault course.
Ferris’s attempt at seduction is the comic contrast to Angel’s bleak barn dance. And it’s fine, because none of us want to take the possibility of statutory rape seriously, not even in a film that seems comfortable with its own mixed messages. And so is Ferris. One minute she’s assuring Gary she’s in love. The next she’s asking if she can stay the night, ‘just for appearances’. When you’re a teen, how you look to your peers is more important than anything, including sex or breaking the law. Which is probably why the overwhelming majority of the ‘how I lost my virginity’ tales I’ve been told by friends are a
nti-climactic at best and tragic at worst. Most of us do it the first time to please everyone else but ourselves.
It turns out Angel and Ferris’s choices weren’t too bad, though. Gary rejects Ferris in a kind and flattering way, allowing her a romantic fantasy about the night she could have, and enough fuel to pretend that she’s won her bet.
And Randy works out that tough Angel ain’t so tough after all, and shows the girl some love. ‘Some guys like to rush,’ he mumbles, Stalloneishly. ‘But not me.’ It’s very endearing, but Dillon’s speciality was that pre-Joey Tribbiani dumb-hunk-with-a-heart-of-gold thing, and he’s essentially the same love thug here as he is in Over The Edge (see here), The Outsiders (see here) and Rumble Fish (see here).
So Angel does lose her virginity but opts to keep it private. Ferris doesn’t and makes up a bet-winning fantasy. ‘This is better than books,’ once of the girls fizzes as they enthusiastically swallow Ferris’s Mills & Boon version of shagging. ‘The truth always is,’ says Sunshine, with neat layers of unintentional irony.
But, for most of us, the truth is the reason why romantic fantasies exist. We don’t see Angel and Randy make love, but we do see the post-coital fallout, and Angel seems miserable. When Randy finally wends his weary way through her beautiful layers of self-defence, and asks her what’s wrong, she simply says: ‘It wasn’t what I thought it would be. God . . . it was so personal. Like you could see right through me.’ Randy’s initial wounded hostility gives way when she confesses that it was her first time. He then performs a radical U-turn and tells her he loves her, but our tearful tomboy is not exactly jumping for joy. ‘I feel so lonesome,’ she whispers, and it’s like he isn’t there at all.
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