“To be a big star in America, you have to have several qualities I don’t have.“

-Anthony Perkins for Newsweek, 1962, as cited in Split Image, p. 235

Goodbye Again (1961)

Those who might still be wondering why Perkins was primarily cast as a romantic leading man (especially considering the two roles I chose to highlight thus far) – you might get a kick out of this adorable, actually pretty timely dramedy.

The plot seems simple enough: Interior designer Paula (Ingrid Bergman) has everything going for her: A successful career, a chic apartment in Paris and even Yves Montand! Well, she almost has him, since Montand plays Roger, a notorious heartbreaker who keeps her at arm’s length whilst not being able to keep his hands off pretty young things. After much commiseration, Paula breaks things off. After much more commiseration, she lets herself be swept off her delicate feet by Philip (Anthony Perkins), the son of a client. Which results in a lot of raised eyebrows, as she’s in her forties – and Philip is barely 25. And suddenly, Roger makes a dramatic reappearance…

Now, the selling point certainly isn’t the English title, which is rumoured to be a (frankly, forgettable) suggestion by Perkins. The original French and the German Title – Aimez-vous Brahms? or Lieben Sie Brahms? or, translated to English, Do You Love Brahm’s? – now that’s got character! Based on a novel by Françoise Sagan and under the directorial helm of Anatole Litvak (Anastasia, The Night of the Generals and no less than two entries on our journey), this itty bitty number has some smart and believable dialogue, of which Perkins gets some of the best lines.

He is genuinely charming, but also pretty needy and immature. There’s plenty of chemistry with Bergman’s Paula, though Goodbye Again knows how to realistically portray the troubling aspects of such an age difference. With 20 years apart, you are bound to be at very different points in your life, not to mention the social pressure from all those nosy people outside of the relationship. If you and I were to consult our hearts, of course we’d all choose both Perkins and Montand in a heartbeat, but we also want what’s best for Paula (since Bergman is just so damn likeable and sweet in the part), and the best would be neither of those guys. A creamy chocolate croissant, peace of mind and a satisfyer – then we’d be talkin’.

For his trouble (figuratively speaking, the shoot was a pretty blissful experience, barring Bergman’s unrequited crush on him), Perkins was awarded with a much desired Palme d’Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. It was to be one of his few notable honours. Although he had gotten even more than a sparkly little statuette: He had chosen this light audience pleaser to avoid typecasting. But if you’re thinking of Psycho again, you’re wrong – Perkins was afraid people still associated him too much with Friendly Persuasion and he was to play the bright-eyed boy next door forever, condemned to the stables for eternity. And why wouldn’t he – after all, Friendly Persuasion had made much bigger waves for him than Psycho did. At the time.

And he had already fallen into that trap a couple of times: Counting the number of instances in which he played the idealistic youngster falling for an older and/or dominant woman, we’ve got the unbearably kitschy Desire Under Elms (1954), his first collaboration with Sophia Loren (and her U.S. debut) or Phaedra (1962) with Milena Mercouri, which was as dry as the sand on the beaches of Greece it was shot on. In both movies, his character falls for his stepmother, because can you ever escape mommy’s clutches, really? This subtext didn’t seem lost on press agent Buddy Clarke, a loose acquaintance. So Clarke offered these (unsolicited) pearls of wisdom:

“Tony, I’m not your manager, but I’d love to be without any fee. What I would do now is I would put you in a Western, put you in jeans, have you fuck a young girl, get the shit kicked out of you, kick the shit out of somebody in a fistfight – change your image.“

– as cited in Split Image, p. 237

Let us collectively take a moment of silence and thank our deities that Perkins did pretty much everything but this. 

Even discounting that he had already done a few Westerns (i.e. Tin Star with Henry Fonda, 1957) and he would do some in the future (The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1972) – playing the uber-macho manly man wouldn’t have befitted him in any genre. That’s why he’d come to Europe – after all, they loved the sensitive types there, so in contrast to the U.S., his natural proclivities finally were an asset, not something he had to work around. And Goodbye Again beautifully demonstrates that Perkins reached his full potential as a leading man if he wasn’t too slick, heroic or ‘masculine’. Selling a fantasy wasn’t his domain, but he was excellent at making the human stain attractive. 

Shooting took place in Paris, where he had made his new home and rented a sizable flat. Owing to his childhood French lessons (thanks, Mother!) and his natural savoir vivre, he blended in fast with the locals and took to the streets and jazz clubs with pals like Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier. Although Perkins didn’t enjoy his time off too much, since there was barely any: His next project would swiftly reunite him with Litvak, but this time, romance wasn’t on the menu.

Five Miles to Midnight (1962)

So this is how we get to my personal delightful surprise in the Perkinsian oeuvre. I love this movie.

After much hassle and tussle, the female lead had fallen onto Sophia Loren. As previously mentioned, she had made her first American movie under Perkins spacious wings, and he remembered working with her fondly. He even altered the lyrics in his cover of the popular Burton Lane/ Ralph Freed number How About You? to “Sophia Loren’s looks give me a thrill”, as many singers are prone to doing to this specific line in the song. 

She was also the primary reason he said yes to Five Miles to Midnight because otherwise, he was one busy bee. On his terms, his career was going swell. He got offers all over Europe and sometimes from back home, and finally, the parts had the complexity he had always dreamed of. In La Glaive et la Balance (1962, translating roughly to The Sword and the Balance, but was also released under the title Two are Guilty), for instance, Perkins got to play a bisexual artist accused of child murder, showing that once again, France knew where it’s at, because in America, they were still busy discussing the toilet thing from Psycho. In The Fool Killer (1965, though filmed in 1963), axe murderer Anthony Perkins would make his way through Tennessee accompanied by a young boy, an all-around pretty Night of the Hunter-esque affair. And that’s not just my fallible perception, it played earlier just last month as a double bill. By the time of release, this part cemented him as no longer the pretty boy, but the tortured murder man, and it was also one of the first tangible moments when the American public began to shout not murder, but typecasting (Which is a shame, because The Fool Killer and Perkins are pretty good on their own merit). One person who definitely didn’t lose interest in Perkins was Orson Welles, who gave him a call around the time he was busy with Five Miles to Midnight.

We’ll explore the whole Welles-Perkins-business later and Five Miles to Midnight in a bit. For now, please refer back to your study notes (you know, mother figures, homoerotic subtext and all that jazz) and add to that “popular collaborateur”. Because that’s what Anthony Perkins was, by all appearances. Because remember, Five Miles to Midnight is his second endeavor with Anatole Litvak, and over the years, the likes of Sidney Lumet and Claude Chabrol would ask for his services a number of times. Even Alfred Hitchcock had originally planned to do a project with Perkins after Psycho, but accounts differ as to why that never happened. Those aren’t directors particularly known for being amiable or low-maintenance. As much as his enormous ambition isolated the man from time to time, Perkins was liked enough by these masters, casts and crews that they held him in high esteem for years to come.
One explanation could be that he wasn’t a method actor, unlike many of his contemporaries like Marlon Brando or close friend Paul Newman. From the 50s up through the 70s, it was probably refreshing working on a set and for once not having to deal with a lead actor who was hangry and unwashed because a role called for it.Though make no mistake – Perkins was very obsessed about his weight, almost always dangerously slender, and several friends and co-workers report behaviour that today would be considered disordered eating at best. He just didn’t do that to ‘get into character’ and he wasn’t a pain on set because of it.

He would have been a royal pain if he had used the method to stay in character as Robert, the second lead and antagonist in Five Miles to Midnight. He is the obsessively jealous part of a multi-national couple living in a modest apartment in Paris. His wife Lisa (Loren) spends much of her screen time terrified of or exhausted by him, though we can tell that intrinsically, she loves life. We all know a woman whose glow has been sorely diminished by a man, so we’re quickly rooting for Lisa when, not too long after being dragged out of a nightclub and slapped by Robert, she announces that she’s leaving him for good this time. Well, she tells him at the airport just as he’s leaving for a business trip and her hubby is having none of it, but the audience is cheering nonetheless. It gets even better when news reaches her that the plane has crashed and her husband has perished, so Lisa can look forward to not having to file divorce papers and filing for the fruits of his life insurance instead. But all happy days must come to an end, and they do so quickly, as soon after Robert knocks on her door, badly disheveled, on the run and with a plan: He wants to hide out at their apartment and keep playing dead. Once Lisa gets his life insurance, he’ll take off with half and, he promises, bother her no more. Until then, he must stay on the low and she has to tolerate him…

In a bad fever dream, all of this could have been a tasteless romantic comedy. Lorens and Perkins are playing it as the thrilling chamber play it is. Their chemistry, alas, met with mixed reception. Director Litvak, in a contemporary interview with the Bayrische Rundfunk, stressed that the disharmony between Lisa and Robert was not only intentional, but a key theme of the movie. Perkins-briographer Winecoff found the 6 foot tall, slender actor to be a hard sell as a wifebeater, especially when paired with curvy Loren, known for playing strong-willed, temperamental women. But that speaks more to an attitude towards domestic violence that is as old as the movie in question.

That may be the only grain of truth in here: Aside from being admittedly slow-paced, Five Miles to Midnight might have failed to connect with a 1960s audience because back then, abusive husbands were thought to be perpetually drunk hunks or carriers of pot bellies in the eponymous white undershirts. If one ‘believed’ in abusive husbands at all – back then, people much more readily believed in ‘failed’ wifes who deserved their lot and the domestic abuser was slightly akin to the Loch Ness monster in that they were occasionally glimpsed, but mostly discussed as a creature of fabrication. Today, however, while we’re still not too sure about Nessie, we do know that abusive husbands (and spouses in general) exist and that Robert is pretty true to form. He is tangibly devoured by his own insecurities, histrionic and at the same time hellishly cunning in covering his tracks and hiding his boundary-crossing.

At times, when playing with a little kitten on the kitchen floor, he seems downright affable. But for someone like Robert, the 180-turn is never too far, and one brilliant instance can be found in the airport separation scene. Robert blankly refuses to accept that Lisa is leaving him, pleads and grovels and then, just as if a switch had been pulled, he announces that he’ll kill her if she ever replaces him with another man. While donning a sugary sweet smile and followed by a chipper “Ciao!” and the firing of a finger gun. Good Lord, Perkins would have deserved that Oscar for this little moment alone.

In general, this movie is where you find Anthony Perkins, put to his best use. Because if you are an advanced Perkins-expert (a Perkinspert, if you will), you know all of the glorious publicity shots in which he has found endlessly creative ways to sit or half-sit on a chair. Granted, the man had long limbs and it must have been hard to neatly arrange them, so he apparently just criss-crossed his legs or crumbled up into a human paper ball the moment the camera went click. And since Robert’s charade requires him to fold himself up, down and sideways inside his and Lisa’s humble abode, Perkins has to amusingly play to his natural strengths while looking for new hideouts.

Litvak was right, by the way – this thriller’s greatest asset is the dynamic between this dysfunctional couple. Lisa’s and Rober’s twist-and-turn-bickering inspires a pretty straight-forward plot, and a potential new paramour  for Lisa played by Gig Young frankly comes across as a new stalker, instead. Nevertheless, the performances are strong across the board, with Loren truly delivering within the film’s last ten minutes. But it is Anthony Perkins who Five Miles to Midnight belongs to. His Robert causes us to feel anger, frustration and curiosity all at once. A timeless villain through and through in this perfect little number for rainy autumn nights.

The Trial (1962)

So – the Orson Welles Story.

Back in 1960, Welles had been approached by producer Alexander Salkind while shooting in Yugoslavia. And Salkind had made the oft-cited offer you can’t refuse, especially if you are a director full of ideas and of slender means: If Welles would make a movie for him, he’d be able to do it with full creative control. The catch was a list Salkind handed him, containing around 80 books in the public domain. Meaning, licensing costs for the source material were off the table. Welles was to pick one. He picked Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

As per usual for Kafka, the plot is absurd. Bank clerk Josef K. is arrested one morning. He doesn’t know what for. Nobody tells him. But he isn’t imprisoned. No, K. is instead sent on an Odyssee through a judicial system he can’t seem to win against. It’s about guilt and justice, but also about fascist structures and K.’s inner demons. Welles wasn’t too hot about it, but Kafka was the most likely candidate on the list, pretty popular with readers at the time and making a sure-bet-box-office-winner all to his own liking? Yes, please.

Only after all was filmed and done, it would emerge that this deal had come with a lot of footnotes. First of all: Salkind, too, wanted to make a successful movie first and foremost, and for that, you’d need an international cast as an incentive for an international audience. You wanted the French to go to the cinema? You cast Jeanne Moreau. Germans? Romy Schneider. But the main part, Josef K., yes, he ought to be American. 

Welles did have a vision for his K.: Since he wanted to shoot in France, Italy and Croatia, it ought to be an available American actor residing in one of these countries. Someone with high publicity and medium paycheck expectations would be swell. And Welles had another special criterium, because he wanted someone who seemed to hide something, who could carry an air of guilty conscience without necessarily seeming guilty. A queer actor with a reputation for mystery-mongering would catapult him to cloud nine.

And Anthony Perkins was all too happy to sail on this cloud with Welles. At least for a time. Because, as it emerged during pre-shooting-preparations, The Trial wasn’t in the public domain after all. A first big cut to the budget. Then things fell apart like dominoes: Locations were cancelled at the last minute. Actors couldn’t be paid. Some parts had to be completely recast altogether (Welles, explaining how he ended up playing K.’s advocate: “ I played the advocate because there was no other actor of my calibre that I could afford”).

You’d think that Perkins had had the time of his life on the set of Psycho, but it was The Trial that the actor was most pleased to be asked about well into the 90’s. He was immensely proud to be working with THE Orson Welles, visionary behind Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil. And this adoration was palpable, because he didn’t leave Welles’ side during filming. Whether the director was scouting locations, working on the script or sitting in a restaurant, eating his usual 7-8 portions of Spaghetti – his lead actor was right there with him. While Perkins was happiest when being allowed to improvise whilst working with Hitchcock, working with Welles was quite the opposite. Welles, famous for his rude tone and his at times cutting directness, bellowed instructions into the megaphone. Perkins followed them down to a t.

The Trial was to become a moderate success. Its creator didn’t stop to bathe in applause for too long, since it hadn’t been a passion project in the first place. It would take years for Welles to consider the film one of his best. He was right. Perkins, for his part, was proud of what they’d achieved, even though he described the end result as rather messy in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich.

Time has been much kinder to The Trial. Audience’s favor with the film has steadily increased, as it is often regarded as the best of all Kafka adaptations. Not that there is much competition in the ring. But the entire cast delivers high-quality-work and seems delicately and perfectly picked, contrary to what a nightmare casting apparently was. Whether Perkins gave Welles exactly the queer-coded, inhibited, secretive performance the maestro had looked for remains a mystery lost to time. But his K. is definitively profiting off of some form of ambiguity. Does he, deep down, know what he is being accused of after all? Does he hide something from us, the audience? How does he view the many women the plot throws his way and that he seems barely interested in? When I read The Trial for the first time (as you can imagine, Kafka is mandatory reading in German-speaking schools and we all strive to be insects at some point), I read K. as an innocent man who still is a bit of a sleaze. Perkins plays him as a pretty decent guy who might well be guilty. 

The opicts of the film have the characteristics of an M. C. Escher-fever dream that the source material frankly demanded. Among black-and-white-pictures, it comes across to perfectly staged that it beggars belief how much went wrong during shooting. And yet, the result contains images that are sure to persist in your daydreams. Even if literature studies weren’t your jam – for heaven’s sake, be good to yourself and go watch The Trial.

Pretty Poison (1968)

Many a rumor exists about what it was that led Anthony Perkins back into the arms of Americana. Might it have been his new sweetheart? In 1960, he had met actor-choreographer Grover Dale while working on the stage play Greenwillow. The relationship had been a slow burn, so to speak. Frank Loesser, showrunner behind Greenwillow, nevertheless was none too pleased. Because Loesser, you see, was a wild mixture of musical composer and near-fanatical homophobe. And he had made it his very own Sisyphus-task to eradicate all gays from Broadway. If he doesn’t seem unsympathetic enough yet – he also wrote “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, world’s favourite date-rape christmas anthem.  

As it were, Perkins’ sexuality was a thorn in Loesser’s side, so he intently set the notes of the main ballad “Never Will I Marry” too high. Perkins, who possessed a nice voice for pop songs, but a mediocre one for Broadway, barely scraped by. Once again, he (rightfully) felt persecuted for who he was. 

Maybe that’s why it took him a while to consider seriously committing to a new relationship. But he stayed in close contact with Grover Dale and by 1964, he made more and more trips to New York to see his fella. At long last, they moved in together.

Considering the era, they were shockingly transparently a couple, especially compared to Perkins’ relationship with Tab Hunter. He also had much more in common with Dale, i.e. a deep passion for board games (why be petrified by the thought of a queer couple? Tremble in fear of a board game couple instead!). Fellow players included Newman and Joanne Woodward as well as bosom buddy Stephen Sondheim. Perkins would co-write the Clue-companion The Last of Sheila (1973) with the latter and co-star in the film WUSA (1970) with the former. America suddenly offered a warm community and a partner who didn’t flinch when Perkins hummed love songs into his ear. Adieu, Europe, all’s well that ends well!

There were some drawbacks, however – returning home, Perkins found himself neatly boxed-in. If his intentions with his first big home project Pretty Poison were to avoid paths he had travelled before, he failed miserably. If, however, it’s all about making good movies – why, we have a successful endeavour in front of our eyes!

This time, he’s playing one Dennis Pitt. The young man (implied to be in his 20s, but Perkins was 35 and looks it) has spent nearly a decade locked away in a psychiatric hospital. Now, he’s out on bail, setting up a new home in New England’s periphery. The audience immediately knows what’s what when his eyes start following a high school student, hopping through the autumn leaves with her marching band. Her name is Sue Ann, played by Tuesday Weld. She’s barely 18. Dennis, who has just taken on a dull job in a chemical plant, starts stalking Sue Ann. To his pleasure, the object of his affections seems almost unbearably naive upon first contact. He makes up an outrageous lie to win her affections. But what Dennis hasn’t worked into his calculations are the numerous poisonous nettles (metaphorically speaking) he has basically thrown himself into…

The truly cozy scenery (filming took place in Massachusetts) is perfectly captured by feature-first-timer Noel Black. He had snagged an Oscar nom for his short film Skaterdater two years before, and even that little glimpse into his craft showed that he was 10 years ahead of the curve. You would place some of Pretty Poison’s shots in the mid-70’s as well.

As it stands, the film solidly rests on the strong shoulders of Perkins and Tuesday Weld. Black had booked them as a quasi-double-deal, since they had just been performing together in the play The Star-Sprangled Girl anyway. Tonally, Pretty Poison places somewhere between Taxi Driver (but make it a romantic comedy) and Heathers, and it really needed a pair for this that was strange but harmonic at the same time. Here, as well as in the theater-esque adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1972), in which she played a burned-out actress and he played her closeted director pal (shocker), Weld emerges as a most compatible leading lady for Perkins.

Alas, privately, she was permanently in conflict with the director on set. Perkins, director’s darling once more, had to play peacekeeper. Ironically, given that he hadn’t been Black’s first choice exactly, and if it had to be Anthony Perkins, couldn’t it be the guy from Friendly Persuasion? What else to do but shrug and ask “Where exactly would a Dennis Pitt ever exist in Friendly Persuasion?”. It’s a bit like walking into a Mexican restaurant and complaining about all the sweet corn (Based on a true story. Customer service remains the biggest horror of them all). Of course, it is Psycho Perkins is treading awfully close to here once more, although he does a fine job demanding the maximal amount of empathy for a role that is one washing cycle less palatable than Norman Bates. He sure does command our good will like a drenched little terrier. A standout is a monologue by the lakeside that would have gone down a truly melodramatic road in the hands of a lesser actor.

If you were on the lookout for a canny little genre-thriller with a touch of Stephen King, Pretty Poison just might steal your heart.

–