Joan Says ‘Fuck,’ Pauline Says ‘Sorry,’ Franco Shows His Dick

I have a weakness for both Joan Collins and Franco Nero, so as soon as I discovered they were in a movie together I knew I had to see it.

Unfortunately, that movie was THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES, a 2017 entry in the Senior Citizens Are People Too comedy sub-genre, the alternative to the Geezers with Guns action genre currently owned by Liam Neeson. These comedies usually exist to (a) give jobs to elderly stars who aren’t Liam Neeson; (b) give elderly audiences not into action (read: women) something to watch; and (c) remind audiences that senior citizens still want to fuck. Though there’s a subset of these films that try to be as raunchy as the stuff made for the kids, like Dirty Grandpa (better to stick to Bad Grandpa, even if it doesn’t star an actual old person), most of them are far gentler, usually staying on the PG-13 side of naughtiness, and usually starring Diane Keaton (Book Club, 5 Flights Up, And So It Goes), Shirley MacLaine (Wild Oats, Elsa & Fred), and/or Morgan Freeman (5 Flights Up, Going in Style, Last Vegas).

Though it’s decidedly R-rated, writer-director Roger Goldby’s The Time of Their Lives is an even gentler SCAPT comedy, so gentle that it’s easy to forget it’s a comedy at all. 

Joan Collins plays Helen Shelly, a one-time movie star, now a penniless kleptomaniac living in a London retirement home where the manager (Allene Quincy) orders her charges about like a general in the Wehrmacht. Pauline Collins plays Priscilla, a doormat of a housewife upon whom her asshole husband Frank (Ronald Pickup) metaphorically wipes his feet. Thanks to a script contrivance, Priscilla accidentally gets included in Helen’s retirement home’s day trip to the beach, kicking off the pair’s madcap adventures. Helen persuades/bullies Priscilla into helping her ditch Ilsa, Wrangler of the Wizened, and abscond to France so she can attend the funeral of an ex-lover. Hilarity Wan smiles ensue.

“Perhaps you remember me?”

“I’m sorry.”

Among their adventures is an encounter with Alberto (Franco Nero, sporting a mullet that earns this movie a place on his bad hair filmography, just after The Visitor and Shark Hunter) after their stolen car runs out of gas. (Yes, they steal a car, a scene that’s not nearly as rib tickling as the movie thinks it is.) Alberto is a painter so famous he can’t walk down the street without being stopped by autograph hounds every few feet. (Quick, filmmakers, name a current living painter or poet who exists on the same strata of celebrity as Robert Downey, Jr. or Cardi B. Can’t think of any? Exactly.) For his first few minutes onscreen we suspect he might also be mute as Alberto does little more than grunt when he encounters Helen and Priscilla stranded on the side of the road. He takes them back to his mansion and, over the protests of his bitchy young nurse (this movie uniformly presents caretakers as forces of evil), invites them to stay the night. Helen all but offers the elderly painter a hand job during dinner, but it’s the shy Priscilla who captures Alberto’s (weak) heart.

“. . .”

The movie continues to follow the well-traveled map of tropes, including old people smoking pot, exposed secrets, a third act break-up, learned lessons and making-up in the finale. The movie’s only surprise is some full-frontal Franco. (I would’ve preferred seeing Franco from 40-years ago, but septuagenarian Franco—who also shows the goods in the series Delicious—makes an impressive daddy bear.)

If only we got the Full Franco when he appeared in
The Third Eye in 1966.

Some might consider Joan’s performance in this movie brave. The role of Helen requires the actress to acknowledge her true age and parody her glamorous image, but this doesn’t make her brave so much as a realist (well, as much as a woman who owns four homes yet denies she’s rich can be) and a good sport, respectively. Joan does get to sing a song, penned by her ex, Anthony Newley, and she sings it well, a pleasant surprise, but otherwise there’s not much here for her to sink her teeth into. Maybe some would find it amusing to hear a woman in her 80s drop a few f-bombs, but most would wish she was wittier lines. She had sharper dialog in The Bitch.

Pauline Collins is equally wasted, her comedic gifts squandered on a character who does little more than apologize for her existence the majority of the movie’s runtime. She does get to show some pluck when she rescues a boy who has fallen into Pertuis d’Antioche strait (Priscilla is an avid swimmer, a detail tied to her not-so-well-kept secret) and bawls out the mother of the boy for being negligent. Yet when she inevitably confronts her prick husband—a scene that really could’ve benefited from giving Priscilla at least one f-bomb—she does so with timidity of a salesclerk informing you your credit card has been declined.

Priscilla’s reticence extends to Goldby’s script and direction as well. You can tell what kind of movie The Time of Their Lives aspires to be, yet too often it pulls its punches as if Goldby is afraid to ask too much of his cast or his audience. The end result is a movie that won’t offend Nana (though seeing Nero’s dick might give her a jolt), but it won’t make her laugh, either.

No Matter How You Spell It

If a movie released today had the title No Man’s Woman, I’d assume it was about female empowerment. It might be set in the 1950s, and it could be the story of a housewife’s awakening of her own agency, realizing the inequities of her station and standing up to the patriarchy as she pursues her dreams of starting the first female-run septic tank cleaning service. It would likely star Jennifer Lawrence or Michelle Williams, and it would bomb at the box office.

But make that movie in the 1950s (1955, specifically) and NO MAN’S WOMAN has a different connotation. It’s a brand of shame, signifying a faithless wife, a two-timing girlfriend, a back-stabbing bitch. No man’s woman? No man would have her!

Plenty of men have had Carolyn Grant—well, really only two, with a third resisting her advances, but because 1950s, she’s a shameless ’ho. This B-grade noir opens with Carolyn (wonderfully played Marie Windsor, to whom Allison Janney bears more than a passing resemblance), tooling down the highway in a convertible full of paintings (she runs an art gallery, more than 20 years ahead of that being the default career for women-who-aren’t-hookers in 1980s movies). When one of the paintings becomes unwrapped she pulls over, asking her male companion, arts columnist Wayne Vincent (Patric Knowles), to take care of the problem. He does so by tearing off the wrapping and tossing it out onto the side of the highway (this movie predates “Native American” PSAs discouraging littering, but I still judged this character for it). Problem solved, Wayne decides to take advantage of pause in their travels to make out with Carolyn, but she resists. She has an appointment with Harlow. “I have to show him some consideration, don’t I darling?” she tells her blue-balled paramour. “After all, he is my husband.”

Of course, she’s cheating on her husband, but here’s the thing: the couple appear to have an open relationship, a shocker for 1955, though the movie tries to appeal to 1950s mores by implying that while the couple lives apart, only Carolyn does any extramarital fucking. The audience is led to believe Harlow (John Archer) is content to putter about his mansion between conjugal visits with his no-good wife, because the reason he wants to talk to Carolyn is to ask for a divorce so he can marry Louise (Nancy Gates). He wants to marry Louise so hard that he’s even willing to keep paying Carolyn a monthly percentage of his earnings. Knowing she’s got Harlow over a barrel, she refuses his offer, demanding $300,000 up front, on top of the monthly percentage. Well, Harlow may be rich, but he’s not that rich. The only way he could pay that is to sell off his father’s share of his company, and Harlow refuses to do that.

C U Next Tuesday!

With her husband sufficiently cock-blocked, Carolyn then decides to seduce the fiancée of her assistant, Betty (Jil Jarmyn). First, of course, is the matter of getting Betty out of the way, so Carolyn tells her she needs to work on a day Betty was originally scheduled to be off — a day Betty was planning on spending with her fiancée — expertly manipulating her into believing she got her dates confused. (Mitigating factor: Betty is as pliable as Silly Putty.) With Betty out of the way, Carolyn is now free to seduce Betty’s fiancée, Dick.

Let’s talk about Dick. Thanks to the sledge-hammer subtlety of John K. Butler’s screenplay, we know Carolyn only wanted Harlow for his money and Wayne because he hypes her gallery in his newspaper column, so presumably she only wants Dick, a man of modest means, for, well, his dick. I realize standards of beauty change—Marilyn Monroe would be body-shamed today—but Dick is played by Richard Crane, an actor who’s more father-of-my-children attractive, yet Carolyn acts as if he’s panty-soaking hot. MST3K was right, 1931-1959 truly was the golden age of the doughy guy.

Carolyn doesn’t make much progress with Dick, a fact that stings all the more when she returns from her “date” to discover Betty, having found out about Carolyn’s deceit, has quit and Wayne has been fired for conflict of interest (remember when that could cost you a job?). Worse, Wayne was blacklisted from the newspaper industry, and he is consequently blacklisted from Carolyn’s cooch. No sooner has Carolyn kicked Wayne to the curb than she has Louise stopping by to appeal to the better angels of her nature and divorce Harlow. Silly bitch, Carolyn doesn’t have any better angels. Carolyn, unsurprisingly, tells Louise to fuck off (I’m paraphrasing).

Could Carolyn’s day get any worse? No, but her night sure can. She’s awakened by an intruder and, after lighting a cigarette (priorities), Carolyn goes downstairs to investigate, whereupon she’s shot and killed.

Given that so much of this movie’s runtime is spent emphasizing how horrible she is — a witch, observes Louise; “No matter how you spell it,” says Harlow — I half expected the cops’ motivation for finding the killer was to give the perpetrator a medal. No such medal is forthcoming when they zero in on Harlow as the prime suspect, however. Instead, they hold him for questioning. Turns out the victim being a cunt doesn’t make the homicide justifiable. Harlow didn’t do it, of course, and he’s ultimately the one to solve the case.

Directed by Franklin Adreon, No Man’s Woman is like a lesser Joan Crawford vehicle crossed with a by-the-numbers police procedural. The first 40 minutes of this movie’s 70-minute runtime are its best, with B-movie staple Windsor stealing the show as the happily remorseless Carolyn. As much as you want Carolyn to die, you kind of wish she got to stick around a while longer. Once she’s gone, the last 30 minutes of No Man’s Woman devolve into the lamest episode of Perry Mason ever. This sub-noir isn’t exactly a must-see, but if you spot it on a streaming service and enjoy watching the vicious deeds of well-dressed women, be they Harriet Craig, Alexis Carrington or Cersei Lannister, No Man’s Woman is worth checking out.

You hardly can tell they aren’t actually on the water.

But What is the Cat Thinking?

WHERE’S ANNIE? is not just the title of this 1963 novel by Eileen Bassing, it’s also the question I kept asking myself while reading it. Specifically: Where’s Annie, and why is she name-checked in title? Because this novel isn’t really about Annie at all.

Annie, the young trophy wife of a retired navy admiral, is but one of a group of American ex-patriots living in an un-named village in Mexico, and even then she is only a peripheral character, having only slightly more impact on the book’s story as the natives of the village.

The book’s actual main character is Victoria, a middle-aged writer who, after ditching husband No. 4, has settled in the village to write a great novel, provided she can get past her writer’s block. Victoria is not an easy character to love. We first meet her when she nearly collides with Andrew Cunningham, Annie’s unhappy husband, while he’s out for his morning walk. “Out of my way,” she says, as though he’s the one at fault. Victoria is too involved in her own thoughts to waste time with social graces.

Victoria is bitchy, but she’s not heartless. She later comes rushing to Cunningham’s aid when his fishing boat sinks in the lake at the edge of the village, then later she organizes a search for Annie when the admiral’s young bride disappears from a party (insert title drop here).

Annie is ultimately found in the arms of another (younger) man. Annie lamely defends herself, telling Victoria that Cunningham is “so…old.”  Victoria encourages Annie to remain faithful to her husband a little longer. “You have time,” Victoria says. “He has…almost no time.” (Bassing is fond of ellipses.)

The Cunninghams leave for the U.S. the next day and Victoria once again focuses on her work. But first, she walks to the post office to see if her agent has sent her a check, then she goes drinking with Charlie, a recovering morphine addict who fights off cravings with booze and pot, and Harry, a junkie who’ll take whatever drug is available. She later meets Ned, a homosexual and gifted artist. Though Ned is perfectly charming, Victoria, who couldn’t give less of a fuck about making a good first impression, is openly hostile. Still, Ned invites her to visit him. She refuses.

Days later she decides to apologize for her rudeness, visiting Ned on the exact same day he comes down with malaria. Victoria elects to stay with him and nurse him back to health, partly out of penance for her earlier treatment of him, but mostly to avoid her typewriter. It’s during this chapter that we get one of the book’s best lines, when Victoria tells Ned, “I’d rather deal with your excrement than your gratitude.”

The pair become friends, but it’s not a healthy friendship. Victoria had to deal with Ned’s literal shit when he was sick but dealing with his metaphorical crap may be worse. It turns out Ned’s charm masks his cold, selfish nature. The pair fight and make-up constantly. He finds her too dowdy, too bohemian, too emotional. She resents his criticisms of her and her writing, but when her temper cools she’s back at his door, seeking his approval. It’s Harry, of all people, who’s the voice of reason:

“[Do] you know what I see Neddy-boy doing? I see him trying to make my Vickie, my original, over into his own mold. He is fashioning, as though he were God, another little Neddy-boy.”

Harry is a drug addict and shit-stirrer, so Victoria dismisses his observations. Besides, she’s too preoccupied with what Ned’s cat is thinking to pay attention to what Harry says.

Let me explain: Late in the book Ned gives Victoria his cat, Hassan, to care for while he’s out of town. This cat behaves like most cats (lies there, mostly), much to the consternation of Victoria.

Could it think? She stared at it and the cat stared back at her, in cross-eyed indifference. After a moment — and she was aware that a lot of time passed this way, hypnotically, with her staring at the cat and the cat staring back at her — it reached out with its paw and pushed at an envelope which was on the shelf near it. The cat did not watch the envelope flutter to the floor, as she did. But wasn’t that proof, since it was a deliberate act, that the cat must have some thought, some reasoning process? Then what could its reasoning process be?

The above text is but a mere taste of Victoria’s obsessing over this cat. Bassing devotes almost three fucking pages to Victoria wondering what makes this goddamned cat tick. I only bothered with one of those pages.

And this tangent about the mysteries of cat thought highlights my biggest problem with Where’s Annie? For all the well-drawn characters and sharp observations, Bassing too often gets bogged down in minutiae at the expense of the story’s momentum. This is a loose, character-driven narrative, with as much attention given to the characters’ inner lives as to the story’s minimal action, but I would argue that any inner life that dwells on the inscrutability of cats is perhaps not a life not worth reading about.

Not helping is Bassing’s tendency to try too hard, her writing often self-consciously literary, as if she’s more interested in impressing critics than engaging readers, similar to how Victoria tailors her writing to please Ned rather than herself. Consequently, this book felt longer than its 382-pages.

But Where’s Annie? has a lot to recommend it. Victoria isn’t particularly likable, but she is relatable. I’ve known people like her—I’ve been friends with them—and as in real life, I was alternately drawn to Victoria for her acerbic wit and put off by her surly attitude. Still, even though I didn’t entirely like her, I didn’t think she deserved the treatment she got form Ned.

Speaking of Ned, while I wouldn’t nominate Bassing for a GLAAD award, her treatment of Ned’s homosexuality is pretty progressive for 1963. She matter-of-factly acknowledges Ned’s queerness (Ned has a boy toy, Manuel), but his homosexuality never becomes his sole character trait. In fact, there are only a couple instances in the book when characters make derogatory comments about Ned’s sexuality. People don’t dislike him because he’s gay, they dislike him because he’s an asshole. 

I didn’t know anything about Eileen Bassing when I was given this book five years ago (my nephew saw it at a used bookstore and thought it looked like something I’d read). Besides Where’s Annie?, she wrote the novel Home Before Dark. According to her obituary — she died in 1977 at age 58 — she also was a screenwriter (she adapted Home Before Dark into a 1958 movie starring Jean Simmons), a story editor and an advisor for the motion picture and TV industries. I’ve seen Home Before Dark and recommend checking it out next time it appears on the TCM schedule. Where’s Annie? is worth checking out, too. If you can fight the temptation to abandon the search early, Where’s Annie? is ultimately a satisfying read.