The Enigmatic, Melancholic Screen Siren

Columbia Pictures knew they had something with Kim Novak, but what they envisioned was a response to Marilyn Monroe’s giggly, jiggly sex goddess persona, a successor to Rita Hayworth’s pinup queen. They wanted a pliable beauty, one that they could readily mold into a star, but Novak was not that kind of star.

She wanted to forge her own singular identity. In the end, she won the war even if she lost several battles along the way. Kim Novak took the blonde bombshell figure and added shades of enigmatic frostiness, an intellectual remoteness, a bone-deep melancholy wrapped up in a remote sexiness. Like other screen sirens before her, notably Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, Novak was not the inviting screen siren begging the camera to love her. She withheld her carnality and emotions. The camera observes Novak from a remove, never gaining too much access into her interior life.

In certain roles, this created a spark of magic, a perfect meeting between actor and part, while in others it leaves a certain vague sense of a pretty girl in a thankless role, a former model trying hard to render poor scripts believable while entrapped in glamorous posing. Yet even in these thankless roles, Novak poses a magic that goes beyond her occasionally limited skills as an actress in her earlier years. She’s magical, mystical, and then she walked away from it all. Keeping generations of audience enamored with a limited body of work, and forsaking it all for a quiet life as an artist and animal rights activist.

Her sojourn into Hollywood stardom seems like a strange aberration. A ten-year whirlwind in which she went from art school student on a semester break modeling for a refrigerator company (the great irony, as Novak would eventually be criticized and celebrated for her iciness),  worked as an extra on Jane Russell’s 1954 vehicle The French Line. She gets discovered by an agent, and by the end of 1954, she’s starring in her first major film, the dirty cop noir drama Pushover. Hollywood legends and dreams are made of this stuff, the stardust we speak of when talking about random people plucked from obscurity to ignite the silver screen. By 1966, she had enough and walked away from it, with sporadic film and television work before finally retiring in 1991. 

My first experience with Novak was Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece of romantic obsession. She was perfection here, and in discovering more about her life and work, there’s much autobiography to unpack. Much like her forced transformation from normal, if incredibly gorgeous, person into blonde cinema goddess, Novak fought against but ultimately realized her limited power in struggling against the powerful men and machinery forcing her into a mold. They wanted to change her name from Marilyn Novak into Kit Marlowe, and compromised on Kim Novak after she fought to keep something of her authentic self in the transformation. This tension enlivens her greatest performances, a yearning for more, sadness about the oppressive forces at play, and a wounded beauty trying valiantly to fight back with varying degrees of success.

I was intrigued by her impressive work in Vertigo, and have spent the past several years trying to watch some of her other films as I could. After finally stumbling across the Kim Novak Collection for cheap at Half-Price Books, I discovered two little-known films in her catalog that contained knockout performances. The two films were of varying quality, but they reignited the urge to watch everything I could find of Novak’s, to really dive deep into her work and explore. Luckily, much of her work is easily available, and I’m only missing a rare film called The Children, a mini-series called Malibu, and I’m skipping out on her year spent reoccurring on Falcon Crest (where she played a character called Kit Marlowe, no one can say she doesn’t have a sense of humor).

CAREER BEGINNINGS
It is not uncommon for major studio era stars to debut and develop over a string of forgettable, minor films, and such was the case with Kim Novak. After extra work in The French Line and Son of Sinbad, she was given the major female role in Pushover, a routine warmed-over retread of Double Indemnity. She’s adequate in the role, awkward and uncomfortable in playing icy seductress or a convincing bad girl with her ethereal beauty doing most of the work in selling the premise. She’s not helped by a script that’s overheated pulp dialog is hard to deliver, frequently sounding more groan worthy than erotic or dangerous.

If Pushover is merely competent at its job, then Phffft’s put most of its thoughts and clever gags in the title and left a stellar cast to flail about. Any and all memorable and amusing jokes here are curiosity of Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon’s major talents. But I can’t spend valuable time praising others when Kim Novak is the subject matter of this essay, can I? Well, it’s tempting as Phffft gives her merely two scenes as a party girl and sex bomb, but the spark of Novak’s better performances is glimpsed here as her beauty is used to contrast a deep insecurity and desperation to be loved. This will become a reoccurring theme in the roles and films Novak excels in.

If her two scenes in Phffft feel vaguely like diversions, like a studio trying to build up its new screen siren, then her character in 5 Against the House is entirely superfluous. In a story of a planned casino heist, a traumatized veteran, and how everything falls apart in the end, she’s the “girlfriend.” A showgirl, a bauble for the men in the film to ogle, and nothing more. She’s fine here, but much like in Pushover, one gets a vague discomfort from being forced to parade around and act as a token object and nothing more. Thankfully, her next film would address this head-on, and Novak’s particular screen presence would finally blossom into something special.

STARDOM YEARS
While I find it nearly impossible to believe that audiences in 1955 found Picnic terribly salacious, and in comparison to many of the decade’s more adventurous works it has curdled, this is still a monumental film in Kim Novak’s ascending into the movie star pantheon.

The problems with Picnic reside in several spots, William Holden’s miscast leading role, director Joshua Logan’s stagey set-ups and frames, and a script that’s all purple prose in its sexual hysteria, but none of them are evident in Kim Novak’s star turn. To hear her speak about the role, she was Madge, the beautiful girl entombed by the choices made for and people only capable of seeing her exterior. There’s a core of truth to her work, and she brings an empathy and anxiety to the role that another actress may have glossed over. Madge is a deeply unhappy girl, and Novak’s passive, zombie-esque line readings slip nicely into a person living a life removed from themselves.

Later in the year she would appear in Otto Preminger’s taboo bursting The Man with the Golden Arm. Granted, the film is an absolutely essential piece of cinema, but it belongs to Frank Sinatra’s lead performance, his finest hour as an actor. Eleanor Parker and Kim Novak provide a tremendous amount of support, but they’re second fiddle to his lead as the two women and romantic interests each vying for Sinatra’s choice.

Parker is the manipulative and abusive wife, hoping to keep him docile and dependent on her. All of the optimism and joy Sinatra’s recovering addict experiences on his days out is quietly crushed down by her. It’s a tour de force for Parker, and she’s every bit as excellent as Sinatra in her villainous role. Then there’s Novak as Molly, an old flame with unresolved romantic and sexual tension practically bursting out of every frame they’re in together. While she’s still a bit green here, Novak eventually emerges as the film’s wounded heart and soul, the bright light in the immense personal darkness the characters find themselves slowly being entrapped by. Her role isn’t as flashy as Parker’s, but in numerous scenes with Sinatra there’s a tenderness and vulnerability that is quite striking. The Man with the Golden Arm is a stellar piece of work for everyone involved, and I feel as if it’s in need of cultural and critical reappraisal and placed alongside great similar films of the era like The Lost Weekend.

After two films in which Novak got to display some range and deliver life to complex characters, she was sacked with The Eddy Duchin Story, an interminable musical biography with an awkward leading performance from Tyrone Power. Novak plays the first wife, and it’s a nothing role. The film is immeasurably aided by her presence, in the full bloom of her movie star charisma, while merely asking her to moodily wander around New York and be a clotheshorse. It asks little of her, but once her character dies off roughly an hour in she takes the film with her. After all, know we’re left with a Tyrone Power performance that flips from over-eagerness to ugly bitterness.

While I can’t proclaim that Jeanne Eagels is that much better a film than The Eddy Duchin Story, it serves Novak’s star persona better and is definitely more entertaining to watch. The script is happy to take a two-thirds fiction/one-third fact approach to the troubled Jeanne Eagels, and frequently flirts with making her downright unlikable and deplorable as a lead. Any rooting interest is down to Novak’s innately sympathetic presence.

This role is a favorite of hers, and it’s no surprise as you watch to film to see why. Sure, she’s slightly awkward as the innocent-but-drive ingénue, but her placid face practically shines with impish, manic glee in later scenes of grand diva bitchery and temper tantrums. She quakes with palpable vulnerability where she places a hat upon a child’s head, only to turn around in a near feral state in scenes of drunken stupors and destructive antics. The final scene, a death march from her dressing room to the stage, is a knockout of interior acting. Her eyes dim and her face turns mannequin-like, and the effect is both harrowing and haunting in equal measure. The period heavy make-up also tends to accentuate one of her best features, her mercurial, limpid eyes.

Has any sequence better symbolized the treatment of Kim Novak by the studio system than the opening sequence? A wide-eyed beauty with dreams of performing, she’s paraded around with the empty promise of a crown, before cruelly being thrown to the sidelines. While another scene has her asking, no begging and pleading, for the chance to do something meatier than merely acting as a cheesecake model, shot down, thrown to the hungry masses, and coolly performing the seductive motions while waiting for something better. The lines between Novak as an upcoming starlet and the troubled star blur repeatedly throughout, and the parallels to Novak practically write themselves.

Two years after The Man with the Golden Arm, Novak and Sinatra reteamed for this romantic musical dramedy, Pal Joey. The title character is a charming cad, a street-wise cool customer, and it fits Sinatra like a glove. He’s in a love triangle with wealthy sugar mama, Rita Hayworth, and the good girl ingénue, Kim Novak.

Pal Joey is a very enjoyable little movie, one that I have a great deal of affection towards. It’s right up there with Guys and Dolls in the quirky, joyous entertainments, and the implications of the lurid and salacious aspects of John O’Hara’s work is all right there.

The real MVP of Pal Joey is Rita Hayworth as she steals the show from everyone else. It takes one hell of a woman to smack Sinatra down to size, but Hayworth is more than up to the task. The same cannot be said for Novak’s nothing of a role. She’s the good girl who tames the naughty boy into virtuous domesticity. Lord knows that her chilly, sexy, slow-burn rendition of “My Funny Valentine” is enough to make a sinner repent (even if her singing voice is dubbed). She tries her best, and she’s sensational in scene where she drunkenly flirts with Joey, but there’s not much for her to do.

She tries does her best to keep up with the others, but she’s outgunned by Rita Hayworth’s natural dynamism and Frank Sinatra’s impeccable cool. I will say this, as superficial as it is, but Novak was frequently dubbed the “lavender blonde” for the wash they would put in her hair. It makes her presence pop that much brighter as it catches the light, and gives her hair a shimmer that is either silvery or faintly purple.

Her next film would take the early promises of roles like Picnic and Jeanne Eagels and take them to their logical, if insane, end point. Vertigo is cinematic nirvana, occupying a rarefied space in my mind near works like The Red Shoes, Chimes at Midnight, and Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Alfred Hitchcock was one of cinema’s greatest entertainers, conjuring masterpieces of popcorn thrills with ease, and alternately one of its greatest experimenters. With his penchant for sneaking subterranean texts into his works, Vertigo reads a self-reflective mea culpa from the auteur and also a hypnotic tale of romantic obsession and the power of the male gaze.

Much of Vertigo is concerned with one man’s ideal woman, and the lengths he’ll go to remaking and remodeling a flesh-and-blood one into the mold of a dead one. It feels uncomfortably close to Hitchcock’s own personal obsession with the remote, unavailable blondes. Here the blonde bombshell, or at least the idealized notion of one, haunts the inflamed erotic fantasies and subsumes the waking life of James Stewart’s detective. It does not matter that Judy is real while Madeline is pure invention, Madeline is the image that has been built up for our admiration and adornment, the flesh can rot. Not only does this feel close to the truth of Hitchcock, but Hollywood in general, and Novak in particular.

Many of Kim Novak’s greatest roles and performances used her perfectly ethereal, emotionally opaque persona to create tension within the narrative. Perhaps it’s inevitably a modern reading, but there was always something spectral about Novak. Knowing she walked away from Hollywood, withheld her public appearances, and forced us to only view her through her studio photo shoots and movies means she remains a captivating smokescreen. This unknowable quality makes for a perfect marriage with Hitchcock and the role, giving the actress not only the role of her career, but one of the essential performances in any Hitchcock film.

The tension in the role comes about in the second half, when the earthy Judy, Novak in a brown wig with eyebrows that look like commas that got misplaced, gets forced into a transformation. The character does this willingly, all for the love of her man, and there’s something alarmingly honest about Novak as a star in these scenes where she becomes a pliable cipher for another man’s obsessions. Cinematic sex sirens are frequently the creations of a studio, and Novak was not entirely different, with the lavender wash put in her hair, the name change, and the limited roles in which they placed her. Her rebellion against these roles fires up her best ones, like Picnic’s small town beauty who longs to be viewed for something other than her appearance, or here in which Novak basically gets to both pare down her beauty and use it as a weapon.

Color coding abounds in the film, heightening the vague notion that this entire thing is a fever-dream that is inescapable. Green is a particular color to pay attention to. When Stewart’s obsessed lover finishes remaking plain-girl Judy into his porcelain, withholding dream she emerges from a green light as though she were a specter taking form. Prior to this scene, Madeline was dressed in ghostly colors, all greys, blacks, and creams, a color palette that gives her the impression of being monochrome in a world of bright VistaVision color. When he first sees Novak’s goddess, she’s in a structural black-and-white gown in a luridly red room, already a haunting presence, and when she reappears as Judy, it’s in once more in green, but a more vibrant and working-class variant. Greens and greys take on the symbolic heft of obsession and dreams, as this idealized woman emerges and re-emerges throughout.

Novak knew that Vertigo was destined for greatness, and while this tale of love as sepulchral ritual bombed in its heyday, time has vindicated her belief in it. Time has also vindicated her performance, which was criticized for being too robotic and remote, as if this performative mode was not the literal intention of not only Hitchcock, but the script. Perhaps no one was quite prepared for the sight of a cinematic maestro destroying his altars and fetishes, for two hours of elliptical, obtuse narrative.

Think of this as Vertigo, take 2, played for laughs and easy-going romance while maintaining that film’s occult and supernatural elements. While Vertigo’s occult and supernatural elements are mere red herrings for the darker truths, Bell Book and Candle is a chic, fun, sexy look at witches in Greenwich Village.

With the right role, Novak’s detached glamour and chilly braininess could be used to great effect. 1958 was clearly the banner year for Novak as a screen icon, as this role is every bit as perfect for her as Vertigo’s tortured duality. Witches here are members of an extended adolescence, and her supremely powerful bohemian longs for real feelings and experiences. Bell taps into her chilly qualities quite literally, making her character devoid of emotions, and the moment she learns that she can know feel them is pure glamour as she artfully cries a single tear over her still face.

Novak’s joy in the role emanates from the screen, and she makes a tangible connection with the character. One can easily imagine her reading the script of a witch happy to trade great power for something real and tangible, slyly smile and node to herself, as she was a sex goddess yearning to break free from the mold. Granted, the overwhelming urge to restore domesticity and the “natural order” reeks of 50s gender politics, but there’s too much fun here to curtail my enjoyment. I mean, this is a film where Novak stares directly into the camera while gently purring and petting her familiar, a cat named Pyewacket, and that’s enough fire anyone’s synapses.

Middle of the Night is a film that Harry Cohn, the impresario of Columbia Pictures, didn’t want Novak to make, but she yearned to do it. Cohn didn’t want his preeminent love goddess anywhere near this kitchen-sink drama about a May-December romance, nor did he want her to complicate her carefully cultivated image by playing a character so openly needy and damaged. She won out, and so did we all. Middle of the Night is clearly the most underappreciated film in her body of work, a clear essential performance where she holds her own opposite Fredric March! Why doesn’t this film have a better reputation?

Novak knew this was a chance for something tougher and meatier, after all the script is from Paddy Chayefsky (Network) and the director is Delbert Mann (Marty). She was right, of course, and she frequently sites this film as a personal favorite. No wonder, she plays a character with a large emotional range, utilizing her natural vulnerability and melancholy into a deeply engaging portrait of a brittle woman desperate for love and affection.

The story concerns an older man (March) bursting with love to give, and no one to accept it. He meets a receptionist, and they embark on a complicated romance. She needs a father figure, a lover, someone to help her break her dependence and yearning for her ex-husband’s sexual advances. Their romance is unconventional and met with skepticism from all sides, but there’s a tenderness to it.

At the time, March got the bulk of the critical praise for his performance, which is no great shock since it was a dependable actor who consistently gave complex and rich readings to a variety of characters. Yet it’s Novak that really took me by surprise here. She rips into the material like a starving artist and not at all like an established movie star. Her voice is pitched higher, frequently sounding pinched and struggling to get the words out in a coherent manner. Her body trembles and her unease in life is palpable in her nervous energy. It’s one of the best films of her career and deserves a second-look, but it’s also one of the last films to really give her something to play. After the failure of Vertigo at the box office, changing box office tastes, and a general wariness with Hollywood at large, Novak’s career would begin a slow decline.

DECLINE
Between 1954 and 1959, Novak appeared in eleven feature films and the glamour of living as a Hollywood sex symbol and major star was wearing thin. This fatigue and rejection of objectification was always humming in the background of her various performances, sometimes coming straight to the front, and it flowers in many of the films she made during her slow decline in the 1960s.

Strangers When We Meet is a tale of marital infidelity, it’s a beautifully adorned film that is a boring slog to get through. I wonder what bits of acerbic undertones or bits of humor another director like Douglas Sirk could get out of this material, because Richard Quine, a frequently Novak collaborator and one-time boyfriend, is not up to the task.

The somnambulist-paced film is only energized by the group of actors Quine assembles to deliver the material. Kirk Douglas at first seems out of place here since this was released during his heyday of grandiose epics and large-scale performances, but he simmers nicely here. But the distaff side fares much better, with Barbara Rush playing Douglas’ wife and Novak his mistress. Novak was never a largely demonstrative actress up to this point, but this kind of material is her forte and her fatigued quality wraps around the character seamlessly. Rush is the strongest performer here, and while the housewife part here is nothing compared to the one she plays in Bigger Than Life, she delivers all of her scenes with grit and commitment.  

After a two year break from films, Novak returned with the cosmopolitan, chic bedroom farce Boys’ Night Out. Despite many of the same players involved as Pillow Talk, this film fails to live up to the frothy heights of that sugar-rush. If anything, Boys’ Night Out proves just how hard Doris Day and Rock Hudson had to work to make that material appear so effortless. Editing is not this film’s friend, as a tighter pace and losing some of the fat would improve this immensely.

Yet this was intended as a career re-launch for Novak, she even set-up a production company to make this. Novak comes across really well in scenes that require her to flirt and spar with James Garner, who easily steals the movie from everyone else with his lovable rascal persona, or act like the brainy grad student. Where she stumbles is in projecting sexual availability and eagerness, and this is a mandatory aspect of the role. Other than a few moments of her becoming visibly guarded, Novak is actually is fine form here. She finally gets to let out her intelligence and brainy quality in large measures and this gives her persona some new textures to play with.

Released the same year as Boys’ Night Out, The Notorious Landlady is another too-long comedy that could have been better with a few edits. Mainly, if Blake Edwards had taken control of his script and directed the hell out of this movie. Richard Quine was a studio workhorse and once that system collapsed his career quickly devolved from the charming highs like Bell Book and Candle or Operation Mad Ball.

Jack Lemmon does what he can to make the laughs bubble up, but his efforts are for not. Fred Astaire is wasted in a thinly written role, but he does what he can with it. Estelle Winwood and Lionel Jeffries fare better in smaller roles, providing much needed doses of droll British wit. And then there’s Novak, who seems entirely sleepy here with the ambiguous role collapsing the further this film drags on. It took a stronger hand to get comedy out of her, but she wasn’t incapable of it. She’s also entirely uncomfortable with the sex siren scenarios at play here, with her body visibly stiffening and recoiling in a peekaboo bathtub scene.

Another two year absence from the screen and Novak returns with one of her strangest performances and one of her greatest. First up in 1964, Of Human Bondage a tortured production reflects in the final film. Three directors, a weak adaptation of a great novel, an indifferent leading man (Laurence Harvey), a distinct lack of chemistry, and an off tone. There’s not heat, no erotic torture and longing, no passion, and Of Human Bondage without those elements is an entirely different property.

Still, there’s one reason to watch this mess, and that’s Kim Novak. She’s not delivering a good performance here in a conventional sense, as she grossly mishandles the role (and the accent), but she’s fascinating to watch. Mildred should not be sympathetic or kittenish, she’s a sociopath with an amorality and sexuality to steamroll over anyone in her way, like a WWI era version of Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face. Yet Novak is frequently playing her slatternly strumpet less as a cruelly manipulative person and far more kittenish Cockney girl. It’s all wrong, but it’s engrossing in its wrongness.

Her looks do much of the work in making Mildred a believable shore that man are happy to crash upon, but Novak’s performance finally works, not as camp or ironically, in the final act. When Mildred returns as a destitute prostitute, Novak takes obvious glee in burying her beauty under hideous makeup and unflattering clothing. She delivers a verbal tirade against Harvey, detailing all the ways she’s hated and mocked him over the years, that’s astounding for the volcanic layers of ugly emotions exploding out after years of repression. When she returns with late-stage syphilis, Novak looks like a hollowed out ghoul. I would deem this performance semi-essential in its layers of bad choices and risible moments, her appalling accent and hideous emotional outbursts, but aside from Novak there’s not much here to point out as positive attributes.

Something of a step-child in Billy Wilder’s body of work, Kiss Me, Stupid is a movie I have a deep fondness for. Jaundiced to a shocking degree, even by the wide standards of Wilder’s work, Kiss Me, Stupid is corrosive, abrasive, and possessing a vulgar integrity, this is like The Apartment’s more grown-up cousin.

Not only does Wilder put female exploitation and fragile masculinity through the wringer, but marriage and upward mobility. If you want to achieve your dreams, then you better be prepared to pay and pay and pay. No sacred cows in any of Wilder’s work, but the way the narrative shuffles around its two female characters into the roles of wife and whore, then switches them, then switches them again is interesting. These two are several steps ahead of the bumbling idiots around them, finding their own ways to survive the acidic male gaze, which Wilder plays as burlesque cruelty and condemns repeatedly.

Then there’s the way Wilder employees his two movie stars, Novak and Dean Martin. Wilder allows them to deconstruct their familiar personas, even outright parody them. Dean Martin brings a daring, even bravely unself-conscious, piece of self-parody in the role of Dino, a popular singer with a penchant for booze and girls. Once Dino winds up in Climax, Nevada, he deadpans, “The only way to go.” Yes, it’s an easy joke, but Martin delivers it with a drunken swagger, landing the joke with more bile. Even better is a sight gag involving Novak and an empty Kleenex box that verges on the pornographic for all the smuttiness he plays it up for, and bless him for it. Martin’s star persona dominates everything in the sleepy hamlet, hammering home the predatory nature of the male ego as Dino happily exchanges sex for performing a song on a Bob Hope special.

As great as Martin is, Novak is even better here. Her casting as a sex bomb is no stretch, and other films that rested upon her carnality she displayed a strong discomfort in the role. Not so here. Novak plays Polly the pistol (what a name!) with a deep melancholy, and once again finds herself in a role that fractures. There’s Polly, the waitress/prostitute, and “Zelda,” where Polly pretends to be the wife of a frustrated wannabe-songwriter in order to seduce Dino, effectively trading sex for a chance at commercial success.

Novak commits completely to the role, deploying a deep, husky voice (her character has a cold), and is at her best in a scene where she expertly avoids the grabby, greedy hands of various bar patrons.  Novak gets to be both an object of desire and a knowing but undefeated welder of her sexuality. The role has echoes of her sublime work in Picnic and Vertigo, and it remains one of Novak’s essential roles. Possibly the last one that is essential for all the right reasons.

The following year’s The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders is an exercise in frustration. Individual elements work, but nothing coheres into a satisfying whole. Moll Flanders comes out the gate with heaving bosoms and ribald humor, then quickly settles into a shapeless mess of odd pacing and a limp central performance.

Not that Novak is given much to play for a majority of the film mind you, but her red wig and cleavage does most of the work for her. She’s positively lovely to look at here, carnal and ample bodied, but once again visibly uncomfortable playing the sex pot for a majority of the movie. She really only livens up in scenes that require her to spar with Richard Johnson, and remaining a limp noodle for a large part of the film. Then, late in the story, she becomes a thief, adopts a series of ridiculous disguises, and repeatedly fends off the lecherous advances of Vittorio de Sica, and there’s some fire and personality in the performance. After the prior year’s career high, and something of an inadvertent caper, it’s a frustratingly limited performance.

Three years separated Moll Flanders and this film, intended as yet another career resurgence. Can a movie be an absolute must-watch without being demonstrably any good? Yes, and that phenomenon is why we have cult classics and midnight movies. I present you with The Legend of Lylah Clare, a hodge-podge narrative of corrosive Hollywood dreams.

Echoing Sunset Boulevard, Rebecca, and Vertigo most prominently, and lacking all of the wit, poetry, and warped beauty of those films, Lylah Clare tells the story of a naïve starlet cast in the biographical film about a tragic actress, only to be possessed by her spirit. Or is she just bonkers? In the end, it doesn’t even matter as the film is so incompetent that it can’t even follow through on this basic premise.

Lylah Clare is fascinating in its confounding choices and grossly mishandled performances. Initially Robert Aldrich was thrilled with casting Kim Novak, and on paper she’s perfect for the dual role, but something went wrong during production. Despite returning to the dual-role scheme and conjuring up a great performance, Novak is clearly unenthused about the material and commits the strangest performance of her career.

She alternates between sleepwalking through a majority of the role and then smirking in the scenes where she’s possessed, or just going completely off-the-rails crazy. Lylah Clare continues the trend of subjecting Novak to scenes of undress and sexual objectification, and she’s palpably distressed in these moments.

It doesn’t matter how many hammy, sturdy character actors or European chic supporting players orbit around her, the entire thing is a grotesquery, a near burlesque of the damned. Then there’s the ending that takes “dog eat dog” to a quite literal place, and it’s a perfect “what the fuck” image to send us out on. Novak and the film are in a strange symbiosis throughout, awful but completely fascinating, and despite nothing working or being “good” in a conventional sense, this is an absolute must-watch.

The Great Bank Robbery finishes out the decade, and she’s Zero Mostel’s sidekick in this alleged comedy-western. You see, this film commits the cardinal sin of bad movies, it’s merely forgettable and boring. I’ve felt fare more passionate disdain (The Eddy Duchin Story) and camp appreciation (The Legend of Lylah Clare) for several other films, and this one is a mere shrug from me. She gets to play her sex siren persona for laughs, including flashing her cleavage and feeding Clint Walker peyote then seducing him. But this the most amount of enthusiasm I can muster up.

SPORADIC APPEARANCES

By 1973, Novak had been absent from the screen for four years. She returned in two projects that year, first her television debut, Third Girl from the Left, and a horror anthology, Tales That Witness Madness. While neither one of them is a great piece of work just lying in wait for rediscovery, it’s nice to see her returning in projects that gave her something to do after the lackluster The Great Bank Robbery.

Third Girl from the Left is the stronger of the two projects, and Novak’s performance here is poignant, filled with her patented cool, cerebral detachment. This detached quality is highly effective here, as she’s playing a chorus girl realizing the parade has passed her by, she’s trapped in go-nowhere career and relationship, longing for something to shake her awake. It’s nice to see a late-period performance from her that feels energized and hungry after so many obtuse choices and missteps.

Nothing prepares you for the opening sequence though. The opening credits are played over a sequence of Novak applying her makeup, transforming from real person into sex symbol right before our eyes. There’s a fetishistic quality on display here. This is Marilyn Novak openly demonstrating the performative nature of turning into Kim Novak, all of the work that goes into maintaining and fabricating that image. Entirely without dialog, Novak keeps her face a blank, withheld canvas that warms up into a sultry smile once she’s completed the transition. The way we build up cinematic personalities, sex goddesses in particular, is examined in a matter of minutes, and it’s a goddamn knockout. Shame the rest of the film isn’t up to following this lead, but it’s enjoyable if very slight.

Tales That Witness Madness is made up of four segments, with Novak only appearing at the very end despite getting top billing. That’s just what happens when you are, or were, a major movie star. “Luau” was original conceived with Rita Hayworth in the lead, but Novak replaced her once Hayworth began displaying early signs of Alzheimer’s. This trivia is more interesting than this segment, and Novak’s performance in particular, which is her most monotone and nakedly neurotic yet. She mashes this one fidgety note in a story of a literary agent engaged in sexual rivalry with her teenage daughter, a Hawaiian client who must sacrifice a virgin to his god, and a predictable payoff. Why this role brought her out of retire is anyone’s guess. Tales That Witness Madness is worth a watch for another screen siren, Joan Collins, engaging in sexual jealous and marital strife with a tree that has smoothly carved breasts.

Another two years, then Novak returned with this C-grade hokum. A television movie about the Bermuda Triangle, a little bit of the occult, a little bit of the supernatural, and a large dose of religiosity for good measure, Satan’s Triangle is nothing you haven’t seen several times before. God, this thing can’t even manage itself as good camp.

So thank god Novak’s leading this thing, because she’s trying valiantly to make this all work. She said that this material’s dabbling in the supernatural and occult themes attracted her, and numerous prior films clue us in that these are subject matters that interest her. She’s the sole survivor of a shipwreck, and she spends the night with Doug McClure’s lieutenant who answered her SOS call recounting the horrors she’s witnessed. Then it all ends in a twist you’ll see coming the minute a priest is introduced to the story.

1977’s The White Buffalo is a bit muddy, but it’s also something of a sleeper. There’s a lot of great promise and premise here, even if the final product is an oddity. It’s slightly impossible to speak about Novak’s role here, as she’s regulated to merely two scenes as an old flame to Charles Bronson’s Wild Bill Hickok. Her lack of screen time is symptomatic of one of the film’s major failings, anemic roles for the supporting players. Bronson and Will Sampson as Crazy Horse are great, Sampson is the strongest in this tale of Moby Dick-as-American folk tragedy, but it wastes Slim Pickens, Clint Walker, Novak, and John Carradine. This is a cinematic sin that handicaps the film that is otherwise worth a cursory watch for its psychological complexity and historical fiction.

Something similar happens in 1979’s Just a Gigolo, David Bowie’s The Graduate-in-Weimer Republic. A film of clumsy tonal coherence and lack of narrative purpose, it’s still highly enjoyable to me in its sloppiness. I’m under no delusions that this a good movie, because it’s not. But there’s something magnetizing about its inability to decide what it is about, and how it is about it.

How exactly Kim Novak, Maria Schell, and Marlene Dietrich were roped into this is anyone’s guess. Schell is left to the wilderness, Dietrich is a glorified cameo that rings with poignancy and self-reflexive sadness while singing the title song, and Novak brings her A-game to a wealthy older woman trying to buy and romance Bowie’s gigolo. She expresses a sad, intelligent sex appeal in a brief close-up of her still face, eyes filled with sadness, and mouth slightly twisted in frustration. But director David Hemmings doesn’t know what to do with all of these characters, but Just a Gigolo is unique in its badness.   

Released in 1980, The Mirror Crack’d is an Agatha Christie pastoral murder-mystery, the perfect type of rainy Sunday afternoon watch. This one is really only fun for watching Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Angela Lansbury, and Novak chew the hell out of the scenery. The central mystery is obvious if you know anything about Gene Tierney, and it sidelines Dame Angela for a large section of the second act, what a no-no since this is a Miss Marple tale.

Normally an interior actress, Novak is big and ostentatious here, playing a grand bitch of the screen. She’s marvelous if underused. She plays a movie star with delusions and no inner life, a creature of pure exterior. It feels like she’s getting to trash the visage of screen goddesses past and present, perhaps even a bit of her own legacy. Even better, if all too brief for my liking, is scene where Novak and Taylor, as long-time rivals, trade icy stares and bitchy verbal barbs like a pair of feuding drag queens. And this is really the only reason to watch The Mirror Crack’d, to witness cinematic legends transforming average material into something better by chewing enough scenery to make a season of RuPaul’s Drag Race feel tame by comparison.

The 1980s were a fairly light period for Novak, preferring to stay away from the business and live out on a large ranch, painting and taking care of her animals. These are the properties that I couldn’t find, and good luck to you in tracking them down. Mainly working in television, Novak appeared in the TV movie Malibu, 19 episodes of Falcon Crest, and the premiere episode of The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Then after ten long years, she returned to the screen in the independent foreign production, The Children. There’s a current effort to restore the film, so maybe we’ll all be able to watch it one day.

To date her final performance is in Liebestraum, a messy movie that is nothing but a series of beautiful images adding up to nothing in particular. She fought with writer/director Mike Figgis, and he threatened to cut her role down to nothing in editing. It would appear Figgis kept true to his word and killed his darling in the process. There’s gaps in logic and story throughout, and Novak’s role has been left more to the vague impressions of a character. This is a tragedy as she’s by far the most interesting presence, still capable of engaging our eyes and holding the screen in her grasp. It’s not the worst final performance, or even an undignified one, but it’s frustratingly empty of context and depth by being edited down so severely.

TCM’s Leading Ladies book singled out the following picks as Novak’s essential works: Picnic, The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo, Bell Book and Candle, and Kiss Me, Stupid. I was tempted to just repeat that series of films, but I argued with myself about wanting to include Middle of the Night. Then the choice came down to axing either Picnic or Golden Arm. In the end, Picnic despite its many faults, is just too essential to understanding Novak’s screen personality to remove. It’s the film that made her a star, and it deserves inclusion. The Man with the Golden Arm is a far better film, but it’s really Sinatra’s major showcase.

My Essential Viewing recommendations:
Picnic
Vertigo
Bell Book and Candle
Middle of the Night
Kiss Me, Stupid