In the town where I live there are two video stores. One is the kind that carries Melanie Griffith movies and one is the kind that doesn't. Oh, all right, they both carry Griffith's mainstream flicks Working Girl and Something Wild. But if you want to see vintage Griffith, prime Griffith, the Ur-Griffith that made Melanie the actress she is today--movies like Cherry 2000, Fear City, Joyride-- you have to visit the video store in the rundown part of town. The other video store doesn't cater to that kind of clientele.
This kind of hoity-toity attitude is unfair to Melanie, of course, but more to the point, it's unfair to her legions of fans, to those of us who have been with her since the beginning. Unlike those Johnny-come-lately aficionados who try to parse and pare the Griffith oeuvre--to act as if her career begins with Jonathan Demme's quirky 1986 hit Something Wild and Mike Nichols's 1988 let's-bash-Sigourney number Working Girl-- those of us who have been keeping an eye on Griffith, or at least an eye on certain parts of Griffith (the part with the tattoo) for a long time, see her films as a continuous, seamless body of work.
What we see is a Melanie Griffith who, from her very earliest days, from her first electrifying performance as a horny nymphet in Night Moves, to her riveting performance as a horny nymphet in The Drowning Pool, to her stunning performance as a horny stripper in Fear City, to her showstopping performance as a horny stripper in Body Double, to her mesmerizing role as a call girl who is not especially horny in Stormy Monday, has given shape and voice and body and soul to that quintessential American archetype: the culturally and politically disenfranchised bimbo. The type of girl who, as Griffith puts it in Working Girl, has "a mind for business and a bod for sin." Not necessarily in that order.
From the middle 1970s until the present, no American actress has shaken her bootie with as much verve, passion, and regularity as Melanie Griffith. Yet, unlike more vulgar, opportunistic performers, Griffith has injected these roles with pathos and compassion, even drawing crocodile tears from enthusiastic audiences filled with men and women who have known, or have themselves been, bimbos, and who recognize a performance that rings true. In the kingdom of the bimbo, Melanie Griffith reigns supreme, making ersatz bimbos like Valerie Perrine seem like pikers or, for that matter, ersatz bimbos As she once told a journalist, "There's a bit of a stripper in every woman." Well, maybe not my wife.
I don't know how much of the stripper in Melanie will come into play in her new one, John Schlesinger's Pacific Heights. It's a psycho-thriller in which she plays yuppie Matthew Modine's girlfriend. But the stripper in her did manage to find expression in Mike Nichols's Working Girl, in which she played yuppie Harrison Ford's girlfriend. And we're likely to see at least a hint of the stripper in her with Brian (Body Double) De Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities, in which she plays the prevaricating, hit-and-run mistress of ultra-yuppie Tom Hanks. That "bit of a stripper" in Melanie Griffith has genuine survival instincts.
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But then, Melanie Griffith is, and has always been, a survivor. The daughter of actress Tippi Hedren and a socially prominent film producer/real estate developer named Peter Griffith, Melanie has had to overcome wealth, celebrity, Catholic boarding school, being in Robby Benson movies, receiving a small pine coffin with a tiny replica of her mother inside as a gift from the ever-thoughtful Alfred Hitchcock, a friendship with Warren Beatty, and the staggering pressures of growing up on an 180-acre ranch with a bunch of wild animals on it, as opposed to, say, East Los Angeles. Well maybe that's not such a good example. Anyway, among living Americans, only George Herbert Walker Bush--who had to deal with the stigma of being born into a wealthy family, named captain of the Yale baseball team, and being the grandson of a president of the U.S. Golf Association--has had to rise above more prejudice. It is a credit to Griffith that she has been as successful as she has in overcoming what must have seemed at times truly insurmountable odds.
Griffith did not want to grow up to be a famous actress whose sexual charge, in the words of the English magazine Time Out, "could pick up confetti on a comb, and turn a man's saliva to gravy." In a 1975 interview with Seventeen magazine, she explained that she wished to attend the Sorbonne and study philosophy. But then at age 18 she got married to Don Johnson, a good-looking actor eight years her senior who had never told Seventeen or anyone else that he wanted to study at the Sorbonne. At the time, Johnson was a virtually unknown vegetarian who could not get any good parts in movies, probably because directors and producers alike thought he would lose them a lot of money. Now, of course, Johnson is very well known.
With the Sorbonne and philosophy on the back burner, Griffith devoted herself to her craft. The road would not be easy. There would be bouts with drugs and alcohol, estrangement from Johnson, more bouts with drugs and alcohol, another marriage, motherhood, reunion with Johnson, many, many leg waxings, and articles in People magazine unfairly dwelling on those bouts with drugs and alcohol. Griffith, who, in addition to being married to Johnson twice has been mauled by a lion once, has clearly seen the dark side of the moon--as have those who have watched her movies.
But all through the dark times, Griffith never allowed personal misfortune to interfere
with her art. Throughout her hegira in the artistic wilderness, when she could not get parts in films like Working Girl or The Milagro Beanfield War, or the new Pacific Heights, or the upcoming Bonfire of the Vanities, or next year's Michael Douglas project Shining Through, Griffith worked hard to hone and polish a screen persona that is as unique in its way as the larger-than-life screen personas of John Wayne, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, and Fred MacMurray. That persona is the instantly recognizable Griffith Girl: a trashy babe in black underpants and matching garter belt with a squeaky voice, a butt that is not to be trifled with, and a heart as wide as Asia. Breast size and tattoo configuration may vary from film to film.
Obiously not everyone is a Melanie Griffith fan. "How could anyone live with a woman who has a voice like that?" is the question my wife asked when she saw me watching Working Girl one evening. It was a legitimate inquiry and yet it reminded me only too well why my wife is an English chartered accountant with two small children and not a handcuff-toting lollapalooza who has turned men's saliva into gravy in an endless succession of torrid flicks. Because, frankly, it's just too easy to pick on Griffith's voice and make remarks like, "She sounds like a three-year-old."
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.
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.
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.