Sunday, May 31, 2009

Start Walkin', Boots

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...

2 comments:

  1. 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.

    But, oh! She was divine in the beginning.

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  2. That catwalk outfit looks like Big Bird reimagined as a hooker.

    She'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.

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