Carnal Knowledge
By Tod Heller
A moment-not a scene, really, but a scene-stealer-that I'll always remember is in Carnal Knowledge: Jack Nicholson, the lucky bastard, is on a date with Ann-Margret. Nicholson plays a certified public accountant who also happens to be a certified pussy bandit, and Ann-Margret is…Ann-Margret. On the date, they do not even have precious little to talk about…they have absolutely nothing to talk about. But Jack's thoughts are our thoughts; his eyes are on the prize, just where ours are, too. As they wine and dine, he offers, just for the sake of some first-date gratuitous touching, to read Ann-Margret's palm.
A-M (I, like millions of others, had been deeply moved years before by her teenage titty-shaking work in Bye Bye Birdie) puts her arms together so that Jack can gain access to her hand. When she shifts, the Earth stops, because in doing so, she forms one of the most awe-inspiring, majestic, stupendous cleavages ever to bubble up on the silver screen. I will never forget it, because I was a teenager when I saw it. The movie had been out for a year already, and the theater was mostly empty. But when A-M formed that wonderful canyon ("Go ahead, jump in," it beckons, and the viewer is tempted, Sherlock Jr.-style, to make the attempt), a combination gasp-and-sigh rose in unison from every male in that theater, the sort of gasp you hear when O. J. Simpson or Robert Durst is acquitted, the sort of sigh you let out when a friend-but not you-wins $10 million in the lottery.
Carnal Knowledge, despite those few seconds, is not a cheery movie. If that were the only movie you ever saw that depicted the arc of a man's sexual life, you would think that we're all MCI and Enron. The depressing truths about love, marriage, and sex in the movie went way, way over my feverishly lusting, bedazzled, long-haired teenage head. It was only years later, when I saw the movie again, that I got it. But even then, the cleavage was still good.
Valley of the Dolls
By Henry Alford
Some cinematic breasts are to be gazed at lustily, and some bespeak the heaving glory of incipient or recent birthing. And yet others are meant to evoke awe and pity. They're beautiful but doom-laden, like a high fever or Robert Kennedy.
None more so than Sharon Tate's in Valley of the Dolls. Playing Jennifer, blond and big-eyed and hushed of voice, she attracts the eye of Tony, a singer whom she'll marry and be impregnated by, only to find out too late that he has an incurable disease. Jennifer resorts to appearing in nudies to foot Tony's sanitarium bill. She decides to abort. And then-as if this pileup of tragic incidents weren't already enough to guarantee the film a homosexual fan base-Jennifer learns that she has breast cancer.
In her final scene in the film, Jennifer lies in bed at the Bel Air Carlton. "How am I going to keep Tony in the sanitarium?" Jennifer laments to her friend Anne, who assures her that she'll find a job. Jennifer gasps, "Anne, honey, let's face it: All I know how to do is take off my clothes," exhibiting the only asset besides her devastating shape that this cruel and Hobbesian fictional world bestows on her-a knowledge of her limitations. Seconds later, alone in the room, Jennifer swallows a fatal fistful of "dolls" and lays her head on the pillow-but not before going to the mirror, removing her satin bed jacket, and gazing wistfully at her twin Three Mile Island-caliber powerhouses of doom-these natural wonders that had gotten her so far but undid her so pitilessly.
Such is the harsh justice of the Valley. Inasmuch as a film whose climactic scene revolves around the yanking off, and subsequent plunging into a toilet, of a wig can be said to have a message, the message relayed by Jennifer's story line is Rely on Your Breasts and You'll Regret It. (Real life, of course, supplied for Tate the ghoulish addendum, And Then Charles Manson's Followers Will Bludgeon You.) Jacqueline Susann's book, on which the movie is based, was rumored to have outsold the Bible when it was published in 1966, not because its lurid pageant of flop sweat and wig tape was such a thoroughly entertaining wallow in the glitter gulch but because it provided a much needed proto-feminist snapshot of the plight and peril of career women.
Indeed, the extent of Jennifer's victimhood is all the more upsetting when you compare her with almost any male movie character who's defined by a body part. The men always fare better-The Wizard of Oz's Scarecrow gets his brain; big-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac dies knowing his inamorata loved him; much crippled and compromised Christy Brown becomes a charmingly cantankerous painter and writer. No, to find an apt comparison for Jennifer, you'd have to search the genres of science fiction and horror. She's no Cyrano. She's Breastzilla.
