Something Wild (Religious Primitive, Orion Pictures, MGM, 1986)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The first of three films my husband Charles and I watched last Saturday, Decembr 10 on Turner Classic Movies was Something Wild, a 1986 film by Jonathan Demme based on a script by E. Max Frye. (I wondered if that was a pseudonym for Demme, though it wasn’t: Frye was a real writer, though most of his credits were for TV.) Something Wild is a quirky (well, given who directed it “quirky” almost comes with the territory) mix of screwball comedy and neo-noir. It deals with a still hunky young executive named Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels while he was still quite young and cute) who has some sort of office job and has just been promoted to a vice-presidency, though we’re never told what he’s vice-president of or what the company he works for actually does. While at a New York restaurant for a quick lunch he’s accosted by a free-spirited woman who calls herself “Lulu” (Melanie Griffith) and is wearing a bobbed black hairdo like that of Louise Brooks as Lulu in the 1928 German silent Pandora’s Box. (It’s also the source for Liza Minnelli’s haircut in Cabaret; at first she wanted to look like Marlene Dietrich, but her dad, director Vincente Minnelli, talked her out of it and suggested Brooks as a better model.) She accuses Charles of not paying for his meal, and it turns out she’s right: he took the bill and pocketed it without paying.

She offers him a ride to his office, only once she’s got him in her car she drives him to Philadelphia, where she takes him to her 10th anniversary high-school class reunion. Along the way she stops at a cheap hotel and they have sex even though he protests that he’s married and has two kids. She even handcuffs him to the bed without bothering to ask for his consent first (an ironic scene given that Griffith’s daughter Dakota Johnson has been the star of the Fifty Shades movies, albeit as the sub instead of the dom!). We get the point rather quickly: she’s supposed to be the sort of free spirit Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck played in the 1930’s seducing the strait-laced young man played by Cary Grant or Henry Fonda. Only on the way to the reunion she stops off to see her mother Rose (Adelle Lutz, whose then-husband David Byrne did the theme song for the film), and not only does “Lulu”’s real name turn out to be Audrey Henkel, she doffs that black wig and those punk clothes. She emerges in a dress her mom saved for her from her old high-school days (it still fits) and shows off her short blonde hair. Audrey also tells her parents that she and Charles have been married to each other since September, and they are planning to have children even though they don’t already have them. This bothers Charles since he’s been telling people he does have kids, and when Audrey confronts him and says she knows his wife left him for the family dentist nine months earlier and took the kids with her, at first we think it’s just more of her typical B.S. but it turns out to be true.

It turns out that he isn’t married anymore but she is: she has an ex-con husband named Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta), who went to prison for sticking up convenience stores and does so again almost immediately once he enters the scene. It’s Liotta’s appearance that abruptly turns Something Wild from neo-screwball into neo-noir, as he turns out to be pathologically jealous of Charles and so determined to get Audrey back he won’t take “no” for an answer. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Liotta got the part because he and Griffith had gone to the same acting school and had remained friends, and when he heard the part of Ray Sinclair had not yet been cast, he arranged for Griffith to get Demme to meet with him. The result was an explosive performance that made Liotta a star after only one previous feature-film credit (The Lonely Lady, 1983) and a few appearances on TV. Liotta died May 26, 2022 of undisclosed causes, and TCM was showing something Wild as part of a two-film tribute to him that began with Dominick and Eugene (1988). Though apparently a nice guy off screen, Liotta specialized in villainous roles like this one and his part as gangster Henry Hill in Martins Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990). The film is already more than half over before Liotta appears, but he juices up the movie and takes it to a whole other level. Determined to get Audrey back by any means necessary, Ray handcuffs Charles to a bathroom drain and then, when Charles pills out the drainpipe and escapes, the two have a struggle literally to the death in which each tries to strange the other with the handcuff chain. It ends with Char4les pushing ray out a window to his death, quitting his job as whatever it was, and running off with Audrey … once he finds her again, which she doesn’t make easy.

One of the things Ben Mankiewicz told us to watch – or at least listen – for is Demme’s unusual use of alternative rock music (along with a few bits of reggae and rap, back when rap was still a new genre and it had room for real wit and sophistication, which today’s rap almost utterly lacks), including a real-life band called “The Feelies” who play “The Willies,” the band at Audrey’s high-school reunion. They play an engaging mix of oddball covers including “I’m a Believer,” the song the young Neil Diamond wrote for The Monkees (done in punk style at almost twice the original tempo),. Freddy Fender’s country hit “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” and a quite good rendition of the David Bowie-John Lennon-Carlos Alomar hit “Fame” which I actually liked better than Bowie’s version. The film’s official theme song, heard over the opening credits, is “Loco de Amor” by David Byrne (whom Demme had previously worked with on the concert feature Stop Making Sense and a music video for a song called “Slippery People”), though the soundtrack music is credited to Laurie Andersona and John Cale (almost two decades before Anderson began a relationship with Cale’s former Velvet Underground bandmate Lou Reed) and the film’s real theme is “Wild Thing,” heard in both the original version by The Troggs (whose lead singer was named Reg Presley, the only other rock star besides Elvis with that last name) and a quite charming rap versioni by Sister Carol which ends the film. Charles was amused by the song he’d recognized as by the band Fine Young Cannibals (“Ever Fallen in Love”) and also by the end credit that read, “Soundtrack Available on MCA Records and Cassettes.” There was no mention of a CD version, even though CD’s had been on the market for three years when this film was made, and according to Mankiewicz a CD version of the soundtrack had been a best seller in its own right. There are no fewer than 49 music credits listed, and to include all of them in the soundtrack would have required at least three LP’s or two CD’s!