Browsing Through Time with Peggy Sue

If you could go travel back to a crucial time in your past and alter the trajectory of your life, what would you change? Is it possible to change one’s fate and destiny? This is the theme of Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) starring Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage.

A change of pace for director Coppola after his epic blockbuster hits The Godfather and Godfather II and the lushly produced but disappointing version of The Outsiders, Peggy Sue is a wistful yet comedic film with an odd charm and metaphysical underpinnings. Here, Coppola assembles a powerhouse cast for a seriocomic and bittersweet film that’s as much about about unresolved issues and dreams that don’t come true as it is about time travel.

On the eve of her divorce from straying husband Charlie (Cage), Peggy Sue attends her 25-year high school reunion, where she suddenly collapses, waking up in the same high school gym in 1960, 25 years earlier.

Kathleen Turner in the title role

“I have come here from 25 years in the future,” Peggy Sue confides in Richard Norvick, the class genius who has become a world-famous inventor by the time of the reunion, played by Barry Miller (memorable as the troubled guy from Saturday Night Fever who falls from the Brooklyn Bridge). Richard shares his own theory of time—Richard’s Burrito, where two ends of space/time time fold in upon themselves and “you can fill it with anything you like.”

When she made Peggy Sue, Kathleen Turner was one of the biggest names in the movies, with a string of hits including Body Heat, Romancing the Stone and Prizzi’s Honor. After her box office mojo cooled, Turner would conquer the Broadway stage and then settle into quirky character roles on film and TV, including a brilliant turn in the John Waters black comedy Serial Mom—another Turner title role.

Peggy and Richard (Barry Miller)

As Peggy Sue Kelcher Bodell, Kathleen Turner has one of her most multidimensional roles, as she must retrace the steps of her teenage life, seeing it now through the eyes of an adult. 

She sees that her soft-spoken mother (a lovely performance by Barbara Harris of Nashville, Freaky Friday and Family Plot fame), with her familiar scent of Chanel #5, is actually an iron butterfly who holds the family together in spite of her sweet and amiable but ne’er do well failure of a husband (Don Murray from Bus Stop and Endless Love). Peggy’s mother warns her not to grow up too fast—and get trapped by man. “Do you know what a penis is, Peggy?” she  asks pointedly. “Stay away from it!”

In spite of herself, Peggy finds herself falling in love with high school sweetheart Charlie all over again, even while telling him, “I’m not crazy enough to marry you twice.” She turns the tables on him and pressures him to make love to her in a parked car in a reversal of 1950s sexual stereotypes.

Nicolas Cage as Charlie, with Jim Carrey, Glenn Withrow and Harry Basil

Charlie is afraid he’ll grow up to be just like his father, selling appliances and chasing women around the store—which is exactly how his life will play out. His long-shot of a dream of becoming a pop star earns him the nickname of “Treble without a Cause,” and Peggy gives him a Beatles song from four years in the future, hoping he can make a success of it, but he changes the lyrics (‘She Loves You - Oooh Ooh Oooh’). “I’ve got the hair, I’ve got the voice, I’ve got the car. I’m gonna be just like Fabian,” he wails. But it is not to be.

As Charlie Bodell, Nicolas Cage, nephew of director Coppola, is either adorable or annoying, depending upon your point of view. He affects a comedically nasal, adenoidal voice that brings to mind a bad impression of Marlon Brando, but in my opinion, the character is quite endearing, sweet and guileless. Cage’s performance is soulful and engaging; as quirky and charismatic in its way as his upcoming role opposite Cher in Moonstruck. 

Peggy is a little rusty at cheerleading practice.

Peggy Sue’s grandparents, beautifully played by Maureen O’Sullivan (the original Jane from the Weissmuller Tarzan movies and Mia Farrow’s mother) and Leon Ames (Judy Garland’s stern but loving father in Meet Me in St. Louis) believe Peggy’s story, revealing their belief in the reincarnation, the paranormal and psychic phenomenon. In fact, Peggy’s grandfather takes her to his masonic lodge meeting, where they conduct a weird ritual to send her back to her own timeframe, replete with a harpist’s rendition of “Beautiful Dreamer” and legendary classic film actor John Carradine (The Ten Commandments) performing the ceremony.

Catherine Hicks and Joan Allen

Suffusing the entire film is an air of melancholy, and between the laughs you’ll find a few moments that may bring a lump to the throat: Peggy “remembering the future,” missing her unborn children; reuniting with her obnoxious sister who obviously had died young, played by Coppola’s daughter Sofia (later to find her own niche as a director rather than actor). When Peggy returns to her own time, it is discovered that her near-death experience was due to an attack of tachycardia, and paramedics had to restart her heart.

Somewhat of a cross between Grease and blockbuster time-travel hit Back To The Future (made the previous year), Coppola's Peggy Sue effectively evokes the period with the music (including “Tequila” by The Champs and “I Wonder Why” by Dion and the Belmonts) cars (“Dad bought an Edsel!”)  and fashions of the day (designed by Theodora Van Runkle). 

Soulmates through time—Charlie and Peggy: "Is, was and always will be."

Viewed today, the film is nostalgic in other ways, too, as we see a few of the cast who went on to greater fame after this film: Jim Carrey before he rocketed to superstar status;  multiple Oscar nominee Joan Allen (The Crucible, The Contender); comedian Wil Shriner; Catherine Hicks (7th Heaven, Marilyn: The Untold Story), and a young Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets) as Peggy’s teenage daughter.

Is time travel possible? That’s always a very interesting question. Peggy Sue Got Married is an entertaining exploration of that timeless theme.

This is an entry in the It's In The Name of the Title Blogathon hosted by RealWeegiemidget Reviews and Taking Up Room. I look forward to reading them all.

Endless Splendor, Star-Crossed Sex

I was 15 years old when Endless Love hit the theaters in 1981. Because it had been given an  R rating by the MPAA, I was still not old enough to be admitted without a parent or guardian, even though the story was all about people almost exactly my age. So I had to sneak in. (First time I had ever done this was to see Saturday Night Fever at the age of 11...I found a seat next to a kindly-looking white-haired woman and struck up a conversation with her, so the usher would think she was my grandmother.) Nothing was going to stop me from seeing these beautiful young stars...naked. I freely admit it, I was a teenage voyeur.

Director Franco Zeffirelli, who so brilliantly captured the raptures and agonies of young love in his iconic version of Romeo and Juliet (1969), plays variations on the same theme for this adaptation of the novel by Scott Spencer. Obviously influenced by other classics of teen angst like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause and Elia Kazan’s adaptation of William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass, Zeffirelli takes the opportunity to push the envelope with this somewhat more explicit depiction of star-crossed love.

David (Martin Hewitt) and Jade (Brooke Shields)

In Zeffirelli’s view, young love and coming of age are, after all, really about sex...youth, beauty and throbbing teenage hormones. Love hurts, yet it hurts so good, especially when the youthful protagonists are obsessed with sex but unable to abandon themselves to nature.

Just before the Reagan ‘80s and the specter of AIDS put a damper on the burgeoning sexual revolution, there was a sweet spot in mainstream entertainment where the extraordinarily free let-it-all-hang-out sexuality of the 70s had a last hurrah. Even ordinary movies seemed to have a freer, more honest and frank approach to storytelling. Endless Love may not be one of the all-time great films, but it’s a potent story about the explosive power of sex, and how it destroys the life of an adolescent boy named David.

Martin Hewitt's defining role

The plot is unquestionably melodramatic and somewhat overwrought. When teenagers David and Jade fall so deeply, passionately and all-consumingly in love that they literally shut out the rest of the world, neglecting school, family and even sleeping and eating to be together, Jade’s worried father puts his foot down and orders them to not to see each other for 30 days...an eternity to a teenager. David has a nervous breakdown and hatches a dangerous plan to insinuate himself back into her family’s good graces: he sets fire to their house, intending to save Jade and them all from the conflagration. The plan backfires, and David must pay for the consequences of his actions; he’s institutionalized as the family moves away, but he never stops hoping to reconcile with Jade. Even more tragedy ensues.

The attractive and talented Martin Hewitt does a fine job carrying the film on his slim shoulders, conveying the dark inner turmoil, obsession and madness his character experiences. Unfortunately, this turned out to be Hewitt’s career pinnacle; he never became a box office personality, though this film was a modest hit upon its release in 1981.

Brooke Shields was flawlessly beautiful

Brooke is incandescently beautiful and has real screen presence, but her thin and reedy voice hampers her effectiveness, particularly in the later scenes in which she portrays Jade as a young adult. (She did work on her vocal instrument in the ensuing years, appearing on Broadway as Rizzo in Grease and in other stage productions, most incredibly as Chris MacNeil in a 2012 stage version of The Exorcist, in which she swore like a sailor!)

Though handsome Hewitt bares all in numerous scenes (reminiscent of Leonard Whiting’s unselfconscious nakedness as Zeffirelli’s Romeo), Shields’s nude scenes were famously played by a body double. After bad press that claimed she allowed the exploitation of her young daughter as sex object in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, mom Teri Shields carefully made sure that Brooke’s love scenes in both The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love were performed by a (rather well-endowed) double, a that fact was well-publicized...somewhat disingenuously, since Shields was still being sold to audiences as a nubile teenage sex nymph.

Beatrice Straight (Network, Poltergeist) and Richard Kiley (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) are effective as David’s cold and emotionless mother and father, more engrossed in their left-wing political causes than they are in parenting. It’s a small wonder that David is seduced not only by the beautiful Jade but by her permissive, hippie-bohemian family as well. The teenage children are allowed to drink wine with dinner, call their mom and dad by their first names and throw wild parties with their parents in attendance. When the young couple first fall in love, her mother and father even allow them to sleep together in Jade’s bedroom.

Don Murray and Shirley Knight as Hugh and Ann

Shirley Knight (remember her as Helen Hunt’s mom in As Good As It Gets?)  gives one of her finest performances as Jade’s mother Ann, the complicated cougar who is obviously attracted to David and gets a vicarious thrill watching her daughter make love to him in front of a roaring fire. Even after David has burned down her house, been convicted of arson and jumped parole to try and find Jade in New York City, Ann remains his friend, still mesmerized by David’s unwavering passion for her daughter.

As Hugh, Jade’s father, Don Murray (Bus Stop, Advise and Consent) fares less well than Knight in creating a nuanced character. Hugh is clearly the villain of the piece, the angry father forbidding Jade to see David and triggering David’s sociopathic behavior.

An early role for Mr. Cruise

The cast also includes a young and unpolished Tom Cruise in a memorable bit as a loquacious classmate, wearing Daisy Duke-style cutoff shorts and a goofy grin; forgotten but fine ‘70s actress Penelope Milford (Coming Home) as Hugh’s young girlfriend; and James Spader (to me, he will always be Jimmy Spader) as brother Keith, then handsome enough to be a teen idol himself, with his feathered blond hair and slim, toned physique, revealed shirtless in more than one scene.

James—then known as Jimmy—Spader

Despite some of its less-than-perfect elements, the film is made with real care and artistry. Zeffirelli creates exquisitely romantic tableaus of his lovers, and his use of light and color in the love scenes are surreal and dreamlike, with icy blues and florid reds, set to the lushly romantic music of Lionel Richie. The opening planetarium scene is an obvious homage to Rebel Without a Cause, and the relationship between Jade and David closely parallels the Romeo and Juliet intensity of Bud (Warren Beatty) and Deenie (Natalie Wood) of Splendor in the Grass, with Zeffirelli’s David having a nervous breakdown every bit as intense as Deenie’s. All in all, I find this film satisfying, even after more than 30 years.

And yes, I did watch the recent remake with Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde. No offense to those young actors, but the movie took too many liberties, reimagining both the plot and characters, to be considered a proper remake. And it just wasn’t any good, in my opinion; and certainly not sexy at all. I’ll stick with Zeffirelli’s original.