This bemusing 1992 snap of Miss Faye Dunaway - who has apparently stumbled off the set of an Adam Ant tribute video onto a catwalk - is, if nothing else, proof positive that the 80s lingered on long after its sell-by date.Dunaway puzzles me. For a decade or so she was the Biggest Star in the World. We see her here about halfway through the long going-wrong that started with Mommie Dearest (or was it The Champ, three years earlier?) and has been going on for rising thirty years. I looked her up just now and was discouraged to discover that in one of her last released films, The Gene Generation, she was fourth-billed in a Bai Ling picture, and that in another she was a one-armed cop in something described as "a rockabilly zombie comedy."
It is, somehow, the longest slow-motion career unravelling I can think of, one that makes (to compare her to the inevitable) Strait-Jacket look like a smart career choice, Berserk the work of an artist in her prime, or Trog a benign valedictory. It can't (just) be the money; it's hard to imagine that a Polish children's fantasy, a Troma thriller, or a cameo in a straight-to-video Andy Dick picture (all actually recent credits) do all that much for even the most cash-strapped movie queen. Is she simply unable to say no?
Perhaps it can all be blamed on these boots. But I have a feeling it's what's in them that's the problem...
Let us not forget Supergirl, the Sunset Blvd, debacle, or - well, we could go and on. I tend to believe the theory that she's just girl who cain't say no; and because of the trash she's been accepting for lo these many years, that's probably all she's getting offered.
ReplyDeleteBut, oh! She was divine in the beginning.
That catwalk outfit looks like Big Bird reimagined as a hooker.
ReplyDeleteShe'll always have Bonnie & Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair, Chinatown & Network on her resume so she's got a place in cinema history.
But I agree. The decline has been far too long and painful.