Melanie Griffith: Dark Side of the Moon

Sometimes this occurs quite early in the film, as if the director wants to warn the audience to get out their combs so that Griffith's sexual charge can attract confetti to them. For example, Fear City opens with Griffith performing a torrid striptease culminating in some rather dynamic rotations of her buttocks. And, of course, Griffith's bottoms-up bondage scene with Jeff Daniels in Something Wild is now legendary. She does some nice ensemble work in panties and brassiere with Alec Baldwin and Joan Cusack in Working Girl But her finest moment--indeed, her finest hour--is the extended sequence in Brian De Palma's Body Double where she taunts and teases Craig Wasson with a buttock-gyrating masturbation scene that he watches through a telescope, not without amusement. Too bad Jimmy Stewart wasn't around for that.

In fact, it is the distinct gyration of her immensely photogenic posterior that enables Wasson to track her down. While casually viewing a local porn channel, Wasson notices a pair of buttocks rotating in a disconcertingly familiar fashion, ultimately enabling him to get to the bottom of this rather strange murder mystery. It is no disservice to Melanie Griffith to say that the frequency and enthusiasm with which she activates her nether regions, coupled with her more conventional thespian charms, is the reason she may yet have a bigger career than, say, Mary Steenburgen. One can only imagine what she might have done as Paul Newman's bump-and-grind amour in Blaze if she hadn't passed on that film to have Don's baby.

Again, as previously noted, there is a tendency among critics to dismiss virtually all of the Griffith canon up until her liaisons with Demme, Nichols, and Mike Figgis: to act as if it's all Class B trash. I think this is a mistake. For one, I do not think it is possible to understand Melanie Griffith The Actress without serious appraisal of films such as Fear City and Cherry 2000. But more to the point, I think that films such as Fear City are almost certain to be treated with more reverence and wonder by future critics than they've been from the hatchet men who review films today. No, not you, Roger.

As the uncharacteristically informative liner notes on the back of the videocassette package note, "All the glitter, glamour and wealth of New York City's 'flesh pot' district--a world inhabited by young and lovely girls who undress themselves for a living and the men who are involved with them--is breathlessly stripped away in Fear City." It is, it is.

Griffith gives a bravura performance playing a junkie stripper who seeks to establish an emotional liaison with her estranged lover and booking agent Tom Berenger, but who resents the fact that he does not talk enough about the things that really matter in life. Incapable of going to work because of fear that she will be sadistically butchered by a demented sex maniac--a legitimate reason for calling in sick--Griffith stays at home in her underwear shooting smack. In this harrowing portrait of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who can only get ahead by screwing her good-looking boss, Griffith evokes harrowing proletarian themes that will find their fullest resonance in the masterful Working Girl.

Another Griffith film that deserves closer attention is Cherry 2000, the futuristic tale of a yuppie whose gorgeous robot girlfriend, the ultimate robotic love machine, goes on the fritz when he tries to bang her on the kitchen floor only to have the suds from the dishwasher overflow and short out all her circuits. Unable to get her repaired and unwilling to accept substitutes--the Bambi 400 or the Cindy 990, or the top-shelf model from the era "when Detroit still cared"--the hero hires veteran tracker Griffith to take him to the Badlands where he can find a brand-new model identical to his old girlfriend, in whose brain he can simply insert the microchip containing the personality of Cherry 2000. But first they must fight a veritable legion of villains, who shoot arrows through men's faces at parties but also mistreat women.

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