The Comeback (Pete Walker, 1978)

The Comeback is a complex, smart, weird, and unusual British-American dark-side-of-show-biz slasher movie, and I greatly enjoyed it. It was my first encounter with the films of Pete Walker, the retired British horror and sexploitation director, and I was surprised to discover that hardcore Walker-heads consider The Comeback one of his lesser films. Considering how much I loved The Comeback, this opinion baffles me and makes me very excited to see his other work.

The film is about former teen idol Nick Cooper, a pop/lite jazz crooner in the Johnny Mathis/Paul Anka/Barry Manilow vein who has been absent from the business for six years. He's played by real-life pop/lite jazz crooner Jack Jones, a pop star in the '60s and frequent TV variety and game show guest in the '60s and '70s who is still a popular Vegas act today. He's probably most famous among my fellow children of the '70s and '80s as the singer of The Love Boat theme. Cooper is attempting to make a comeback after a difficult divorce by recording a new album outside of London (he's an American who is more popular in the UK) under the auspices of his controlling former manager Webster Jones (David Doyle, fellow Nebraska native who attended my alma mater of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he was good friends with classmate Johnny Carson). Sparks quickly fly between Nick and Webster's secretary/assistant Linda, while unbeknownst to Nick, his ex-wife Gail (Holly Palance, daughter of Jack Palance) has returned to London and their old penthouse apartment, where she will encounter an uninvited guest.

Linda is played by Pamela Stephenson, an actor and sketch comedian who was a Saturday Night Live cast member on the 1984-85 season, the last one before Lorne Michaels returned. She quit showbiz in the '90s to become a psychologist and has also worked as a psychology professor in addition to founding a dance company, writing several books, doing charity work, and undertaking two year-long South Seas voyages. She's married to actor/comedian Billy Connolly. I don't understand where people like this get their energy. I'm mentally exhausted after loading the dishwasher.

Back to the somewhat complicated story. Nick finds the memories of his broken marriage too painful, so he's decided to sell the penthouse apartment (a swanky pad hidden away in an otherwise creepily abandoned building accessible by a creepy unmarked alley door and an even creepier manual elevator) and rent a room in an equally creepy country manor 40 miles outside London while he records the smooth, velvety tunes for his new album (sample lyric: "sing about a man who gave a picnic on the moon/he never stopped to thank you for the love he left so soon"). The manor owners are away on a year-long round-the-world sailing trip, so Nick is sharing the sprawling estate with the elderly caretaking couple who clean and garden the property, Mr. and Mrs. B (Bill Owen and Sheila Keith). The Bs are a trip, and they give off some serious weird vibes, but Nick rolls with it. Our other major character is Nick's longtime assistant/equipment technician Harry (Peter Turner, Gloria Grahame's much-younger boyfriend in the last three years of her life) (does every actor in this movie have an interesting life story?), a nasty piece of work whose overprotectiveness of Nick and misogynistic suspicion of any woman in Nick's life lead him to some pretty dark places. Nobody likes Harry, and Harry reciprocates that dislike, but the easygoing Nick overlooks the sour man's many flaws. Meanwhile, a murderer in an old woman's mask and clothing is secretly killing people in Nick's circle, and Nick is hearing screams and cries in the manor at night and hallucinating corpses even though he doesn't even know about the murders yet. And Mr. and Mrs. B just keep getting weirder. At most points in the film, every single character is a likely candidate for the killer.

My wife and I were talking about the movie this morning, and she made so many good points and observations that I asked her if she would write the post while I kicked back and drank coffee. She declined, but these next few paragraphs come from the twisted, beautiful mind of my wife Kristy.

She made a sharp observation that the character of Nick is put in a position and in several situations that are usually reserved for women characters, especially in genre films of this era made by male directors. Nick can't decide if what he's seeing and hearing are real or if he's losing his mind, and the other characters try to convince him that he's losing it. When he encounters something scary, he doesn't spring into action. He reacts with real fear, and he loses his composure, unable to handle what he's seeing. He's also a relatively passive character, who lets other people decide the direction of his life and career, and he abandoned his UK pop idol fame at the request of his ex-wife Gail. I don't think any of the preceding examples belong exclusively, or even more often, to one gender, and most of us would react the way Nick reacts when he sees what he sees, but these behaviors are often gendered in film, with women freezing in fear, being told they're going crazy, and having their actions and movements during a crisis dictated by a strong male character. Men pressuring their wives to leave their careers is a common occurrence, inside showbiz and out, and it's fascinating to get the reversal here.

The other characters in the film blame Gail for stalling his career, and viewers may have been more sympathetic to that opinion if the opening scene wasn't presented from her point of view. Instead of the manipulative, career-killing, success-hungry, unfaithful woman existing in the other characters' minds, we see that she loved her husband and his music and is sad about their failed marriage. She also had his back when the other characters just wanted their piece of his money and fame. He was aging out of the teen idol role anyway, and Gail thought a return to the United States and meatier, more contemporary songs were the way to go. It didn't work out, but it was hardly the evil plot of a gold-digger. This living, breathing (at least for a while) version of Gail we see from the film's beginning is at odds with the scheming version of her we see in Webster's flashback/memory later in the running time, a clever way for the filmmaker to ask the audience if he's presenting the unreliability of memory or the complex and contradictory behaviors that make up a single person without giving us a clear answer.

Walker captures all this complexity with a sharp eye, perfect locations, and clever editing, his killer is unsettling as hell, and he knows how to quickly shift sympathy and perspective so the audience identifies with multiple characters even as we're suspicious of most of them. I also like how his ending puts forward the idea that the surviving characters will have aftereffects of the trauma they experienced. Most movies act like the survivors are going to be just fine. Jack Jones is great in the lead, and he plays his pop star as a normal, down-to-earth guy who got famous because he could sing, not because he's some success-driven inhuman demigod or spoiled manchild with amazing talent, and he reacts to weird shit the way the average person would react to weird shit. Bryan Ferry was initially offered the role, but he turned it down. As much as I love Roxy Music, I think Jack Jones was the right choice. Ferry would have been too cool, too knowing, and it would have been harder for an audience to forget who he was outside of the character, though it probably would have made The Comeback a bigger cult film.

I really liked this movie, and there are dozens of curious details I haven't even mentioned yet (Webster's secret life, a mysterious book of Chinese mythology, a gas-masked dummy on an apartment stairwell, the artificially colored sky above the manor at night, etc.). It truly feels like the period between the mid-'60s and the early '90s contains an inexhaustible treasure chest of neglected (or belatedly appreciated) oddball gems. I'm in my mid-forties, and I keep discovering at least one a week. I salute every one of these filmmakers for consistently injecting my difficult life with 50cc of soul-saving freakitude. Pete Walker, I need to see more of your movies.