Melanie Griffith: Dark Side of the Moon

This affords Griffith the opportunity to wield rocket launchers, chuck hand grenades, blow up all manner of vehicles, and generally behave in a Rambo-like fashion (an especially convincing moment occurs when Griffith has to repair a biplane. It also allows audiences to see the large but not especially lithe Griffith sprint 100 yards across open terrain as machine guns spray bullets at her feet; not since the Washington Redskins used to hand John "Diesel" Riggins the pigskin on fourth-and-three has the fun-loving American public been treated to the sight of so much indefatigably determined beef on the hoof.

A more recent film that has not received the acclaim it deserves is Mike Figgis's brooding Stormy Monday, an Internal Affairs Goes U.K. This dreary, gloomy film noir, set in the dreary, gloomy Northern industrial city of Newcastle, England, casts Sting as a dreary, gloomy nightclub owner menaced by dreary, gloomy hoods dispatched by Tommy Lee Jones, who plays a dreary, gloomy American businessman who is obviously a crook. Newcastle is the town where Eric Burdon & The Animals ("We Gotta Get Out of This Place") grew up.

At least part of Sting's gloomy dreariness can be explained by the fact that he books acts such as the Cracow Jazz Ensemble. But even more can be explained by the fact that Sting is the only man in the movie that doesn't get a shot at Griffith, who plays a gloomy, dreary refugee from Minnesota who doubles as a high-priced call girl and a low-priced waitress. Included among Griffith's admirers is one of Tommy Lee Jones's thuggish associates, who tries to run his hand up Griffith's dress and in return gets his testicles scrunched in her trash compactor fist. You can bet your bottom dollar that his saliva turned to gravy.

Because Griffith has played so many nymphets, sexpots, hookers, strippers, party girls--or what The New York Times calls "sirens"--and because of the unflattering portrait of her that appears in Pamela Des Barres's I'm With The Band: Confessions of a Groupie, an unsophisticated moviegoer might find himself or herself asking the question: Is Melanie Griffith herself a bimbo? Clearly, there are bimbonic qualities to her personality: there's the voice, and the fact that she doesn't give the impression in interviews that she's done the MIT Directed Readings Program. And anyone who beats out professional porn film stars such as Annette Haven for a role as a professional porn film star--as Griffith did in Body Double--has clearly been spending more time in nightclubs than, say, at the Sorbonne.

Yet there is a curious double standard in such an accusation. Does anyone ever accuse Sylvester Stallone of being a tall, musclebound moron simply because he plays tall, musclebound morons? No, because Sylvester Stallone is short. For similar reasons, no one accuses Meryl Streep of being a dog hater just because dingos ate her baby in that movie set in Australia. Griffith's problem is guilt by association: because she has been married twice to Don Johnson, there is a natural propensity on the part of the press to brand her as a dim bulb.

This is not fair to her, and it is not fair to Johnson. Don Johnson once dated Barbra Streisand. Producer, director, and co-author of Yentl, Streisand is not the kind of woman who goes out and dates a man who would marry a bimbo twice. Also, she has made records with Neil Diamond. Case closed.

What we have in Melanie Griffith is a cunning actress who masquerades as bimbos in order to draw attention to the plight of the bimbo. Yet, as she demonstrates to majestic effect in Working Girl, just because you're a squeaky-voiced airhead from Staten Island whose best girlfriend looks like Vampira and whose boyfriend talks like Danny Aiello doesn't mean you can't grow up to be an investment banker. You don't have to stop being a bimbo. You just have to stop dressing like one.

The message of Melanie Griffith is a message of hope. But it is also a message of defiance. It is the message of a girl who's been cheated, been mistreated, been made blue. Been lied to, and who quite justifiably wonders, "When will I be loved?" But it is also the message of a girl who is not afraid to throw down the gauntlet, of a girl who is not afraid to stare a man dead in the eyes and tell him flat out the rules of the game. As she declares in the climactic sequence of Body Double in which she spits out perfectly clearly the precise parameters of her relationship with Craig Wasson: "There are some things that I like to get straight right up front so that there are no misunderstandings later on. I do not do animal acts. I do not do S&M or any variations of that particular bent. No water sports either. I will not shave my pussy. No fist-fucking. And absolutely no coming in my face." A girl has to draw the line somewhere.

Joe Queenan writes for Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal. He wrote about Alfred Hitchcock for Movieline's August issue.

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