"We may be through with the past, ...
but the past
ain't through with us."
Dr. Bergen Evans,
"The Natural History of Nonsense"
The All-American Boy is one of those personal, character-driven,
idiosyncratic stories about working class alienation that were so popular from
the late fifties until the early seventies. Think Picnic with a 1970s facelift.
A small-town boy (Jon Voight) uses boxing and his good looks to manipulate his
way out of small-town life. It is actually an arty drama disguised as a boxing
movie, and was almost withheld from distribution altogether by studio bosses who
doubted the commercial appeal of this self-consciously intellectual film with a
contemptuous view of an America populated by Yabbos who have no genuine values
and are incapable of real love. The film sat on the shelves for many months and was
finally released in 1973 when Voight's star was shining brightly after
Deliverance. It turned out that the studio chiefs had been right all along. The
film basically did nothing in its theatrical run, and didn't even have much of
an post-theatrical afterlife since it was way too serious for the drive-in
market and was a few years early for VHS success. In fact, I don't even remember
ever having previously read about this film in my life. If I ever knew it
existed, I had long since forgotten it until today.
But it stirred a memory ...
So many years ago that they are best counted in decades, I used to watch an
obscure ABC television show called That's Life. The hook of this particular show
was that it presented an original musical comedy each and every week. It was not
a musical comedy review program, like Carol Burnett, but an actual plot-driven
musical comedy, like Oklahoma or How to Succeed in Business ... In fact, it starred the
very guy who
had been a smash on Broadway in How to Succeed, Robert Morse, and it even
featured guest appearances from the giants of musical theater, like Liza
Minnelli. Although it was probably best described as a singing sitcom, it was in
some other respects more like a soap opera than a sitcom. For example, the
characters' lives progressed and developed dramatically. The lead couple started
as dating singles, got married, had a baby, and so forth.
The show didn't last long, perhaps because the potential audience just was
too small, or maybe because there was just nowhere to go with the concept, or
maybe because it's impossible to write an hour's worth of terrific songs week
after week, or maybe because ABC made the rather inexplicable decision to slot
the show at 10:00 PM on Tuesday night, with a lead-in from Police Story. I
suppose the ABC suits thought a Broadway musical was appropriate
counter-programming, since the other networks were airing 60 Minutes and the
second half of the Movie of the Week. Whatever the reasons, the show didn't
catch on. I only watched it once or twice myself, although it hung in there from
September until May.
The point of this reminiscence in this particular context is that the female
star of That's Life was the same as the female star of the film I'm supposed to
be writing about here. Her name was E.J. Peaker; she was cute and really filled out a blouse
nicely. You probably don't remember her because her post-1973 career consisted
of a game show here, a "Love American Style" there, and an obscure movie every few
years. After having disappeared for a while, she made a brief comeback in the
early years of this century, with her biggest role having been an impersonation
of Natalie
Schafer (Mrs. Lovey Howell) in
Surviving
Gilligan's Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three Hour Tour in
History. I always wondered what E.J. looked like naked, and never
realized that she did a fairly long nude scene in The All-American Boy. After
all these years, after having forgotten all about her existence, I found myself
looking at her fleshy breasts and buns some forty years after I found and lost
the urge to see her naked.
We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.
