Baby Love

Pretty Baby (1978). Keith Carradine, a corpse masquerading as an actor, marries Brooke Shields, a charismatic, 12-year-old prostitute. But not even she can breathe any life into the anorexic deadbeat.

Susan Sarandon steps out of character by showing off her breasts.

Sabrina (1954). Audrey Hepburn spends two hours dressed like a wholesome Jean Seberg, while aging juvenile playboy William Holden gets champagne flute fragments impacted in his ass. Humphrey Bogart, mysteriously cast as a Wall Street tycoon, wears a Homburg, mumbles a lot, and eventually sails off to Paris with the perky Hepburn. John Williams, cast as Hepburn's chauffeur-dad, hams it up. From the unchallenged genius Billy Wilder.

Voyager (1991). In a real stretch, Sam Shepard plays a mopey civil engineer who falls in love with the daughter of a woman he deserted 20 years earlier because she wanted to have a baby, while he bad a good job offer in Baghdad. The girl gels bit by a poisonous snake, but doesn't die from the snakebite. Instead, she dies from the bump on her head caused by keeling over a rock after the snake bit her. Mom sees Sam off to the airport, but expresses no interest in resuming their admittedly offbeat relationship. Oedipal.

The final three movies in our collection all showcase the work of one of the silver screen's living legends: Mariel Hemingway. It is often said that fine wines get better as they get older. But Mariel Hemingway comes straight from the vineyards of Ernest & Julio Gallo. In 1979, she was passable as the high-school senior Woody Allen fell in love with in Manhattan, but was ludicrous as the white-trash babe Peter O'Toole falls for in Creator (1985), and was unspeakable as the nymphet James Garner gets involved with in Sunset (1988).

In fact, Mariel Hemingway's three incursions into May/December romances underscore why movies of this ilk are generally so bad. May/December--or jailbait--films by their very nature juxtapose a young actress with a much older actor. This almost invariably results in a profound dramatic imbalance, because the veteran actor can usually act the pants off the female newcomer. The result is something akin to Muhammad Ali sharing the ring with Richard Simmons, contributing to such unlikely pairings as:

James Mason/Sue Lyon

Peter O'Toole/Mariel Hemingway

Stacy Keach/Pia Zadora

Marlon Brando/Maria Schneider

Michael Caine/Michelle Johnson

All things considered, it's surprising that the films aren't a lot worse.

On the other hand, they're bad enough. In the horrendous Creator, Mariel plays a trash-talking truckstop babe who gets involved with the donnish biologist Peter O'Toole, who is attempting to genetically reconstruct his wife, dead for 30 years (her amino acids are out of sequence, that's the reason for the holdup). Vincent Spano is also in this film, but let's not get into that. Mariel is especially unconvincing in a scene where, bathed in grease, she repairs a pick-up truck while singing, "I'm a Woman--W-O-M-A-N." In another scene, she falls asleep on the couch, and as the camera lovingly hovers above her face, the viewer is treated to indisputable celluloid evidence that Mariel can act bad in her sleep, no mean feat.

Then there's Sunset, Blake Edwards's miraculous 1988 bomb, in which Mariel plays a cross-dressing bordello operator who falls in love with James Garner, who plays a 90-year-old Wyatt Earp who has come to Hollywood to work as a consultant on a cowboy movie starring Tom Mix, played with verve, gusto and panache by Bruce Willis, I kid you not.

Unmentionably retrograde as these films are, they form essential components of the Home Nymphet Video Collection. Despite their absurd plots, their horrible scripts, their eighth-rate acting and Vincent Spano, these films, viewed as a unit, provide an indispensable moral compass that horny, middle-aged men everywhere can use when reaching a decision about preying on women who are young enough to be their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren or nieces once removed by marriage. Had Woody Allen looked at these films, or looked at them more carefully, he would have been less reckless in making the decision to abandon Ms. Farrow and take up with one of her numerous, United Colors of Benetton daughters. Woody would have learned from Mason, would have learned from Brando, would have learned from Keach. Oh, he might have been momentarily blinded by the moral frappe served up in numbskull piffle such as Sabrina and Funny Face, but had he really studied these movies, and studied them carefully, the way he studied The Seventh Seal and Grand Illusion, he would have stuck to the straight and narrow. Instead, he has strayed far from the path of righteousness, and must now accept the same verdict from society that Sue Lyon once handed down to James Mason: "You're sick , . . You need help."

Only Pia would disagree.

Joe Queenan became Mickey Rourke (for just one day, you understand) for our December issue.

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