Melanie Griffith: Dark Side of the Moon

The fact is, Griffith's infantile voice is part and parcel of her appeal. Some observers have labeled the voice "Kewpie-dollish," while others have pinpointed it as having an almost Betty Boopish quality. Bernardo Bertolucci, one can only assume, hears something different and less cartoonish than the rest of us, to have wanted Griffith for the lead in his Sahara tragedy The Sheltering Sky, but we will never know about this since she turned down that film, possibly the toniest project she's ever been offered. Personally, I find Griffith's voice and her curiously studied inflection--witness the almost phonetic fashion in which she reads her lines in Cherry 2000 in a style reminiscent of Charles Bronson's in movies such as The Mechanic-- not unlike the pitch and delivery of those talking dolls that were so popular when I was growing up. The way I see it, Griffith's appeal to the male moviegoer probably derives in large part from the fact that, deep down inside, every red-blooded American man has at one time in his life harbored a secret desire to go to bed with Chatty Cathy.

Griffith's seemingly infantile voice must also be considered in light of her relationship with Don Johnson. Whereas Griffith possesses a high-pitched, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth, little girl voice that does not seem to go with her robust physique, Johnson has an artificially deep voice that seems out of place in what seems to be a thoroughly magnificent but nonetheless normal-sized body. Were the two grafted together, the pair would at least have one normal speaking voice between them. This symbiotic need to drown out each other's physically incongruous voices and create a choirlike effect is almost certainly the reason they chose to remarry and appear in public together. That and the fact that her body can turn men's saliva into gravy.

Physically, Griffith is capable of the most protean transformations imaginable, being her generation's female equivalent of Paul Muni and Lon Chaney-- the men of a thousand faces. For example, in Abel Ferrara's vastly underrated Fear City-- a film about the largely unspoken bond between New York strippers and their booking agents-- Griffith bears a striking resemblance to Cheryl Ladd, with perhaps a slightly larger bottom and a slightly smaller brain. In Body Double she does a very fine impersonation of Victoria Principal, until she tosses away the wig and makeup and reverts to the Billy Idol look. In Cherry 2000, she sports a striking shock of reddish hair, and looks not entirely unlike Ronald McDonald. In Something Wild she does her Louise Brooks routine. And in the more recent Stormy Monday, her spiky reddish hair makes her look like every punk female who grew up in London or New York City from 1976 to 1985.

Griffith's bosom has hardly received short shrift from film to film, but her derriere-- which, after all, pays the bills-- has gotten the most attention. Not since the days when Josephine Baker took Paris by storm has one single part of a female's anatomy been so pivotal to her success. Though Griffith has occasionally managed to keep her clothes on for extended periods of time in films such as She's in the Array Now and One on One, this is generally not the case, and in many of her films, the audience is treated to extended cinematographic homage to her physique, with particular attention rendered to those edifying glutes.

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