Lenny (Marvin Worth Productions, Tribe Entertainment Group, United Artists, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I got home last night (Saturday, June 10) in time to watch a couple of films I really wanted to see on Turner Classic Movies. One was the 1974 biopic Lenny about the life and times of stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce (true name: Leonard Alfred Schneider), starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce; Valerie Perrine as his wife, stripper Honey Harlowe; and Jan Miner as Sally Marr, Bruce’s mother. Though I never actually saw him perform, I grew up with Lenny Bruce via my own mother, who saw him many times and had a copy of one of his most famous albums, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, made for Fantasy Records in 1959 and pressed, like all Fantasy albums at the time, on translucent red vinyl. Lenny Bruce died in 1966 of an overdose of heroin at age 40, but even before then he’d already become a cult figure among rebellious American youth; while Bruce was still alive Grace Slick, later lead singer with the Jefferson Airplane, wrote a song called “Father Bruce” and performed it with her original band, The Great Society. After Bruce’s death Ballantine published a paperback book called The Essential Lenny Bruce transcribed from tapes of his shows – which, because he was constantly being prosecuted for obscenity, he had often recorded, spending thousands of dollars on state-of-the-art tape equipment so he could present his shows in court as they had actually occurred instead of hearing police officers do dry, emotionless readings of stenographic records of his shows. I was a huge Lenny Bruce fan and so when the film Lenny came out in theatres in 1974 I rushed to see it – it’s still a weird experience to me to see a film hailed as a “classic” on TCM when I saw it in a theatre on its initial release – and I loved it then. It doesn’t seem quite as good now as it did then, but it’s still pretty good.

The film was directed by Bob Fosse – his third of only five movies as a full director (not just a choreographer), and like all Fosse’s films Lenny deals with the underbelly of show business. The script was by Julian Barry based on a play he’d previously had staged (with Cliff Gorman as Lenny Bruce, and naturally Gorman was quite upset that he was passed over for the film version because Dustin Hoffman had a bigger movie “name”; another performer who was up for the role was, of all people, Neil Diamond, who reportedly wrote the song “I Am … I Said” as an expression of his hurt and frustration over not getting the part), and Hoffman watched every film he could find of Lenny Bruce performing to make sure he got the character as “right” as possible. The odd part of Lenny Bruce’s life was that he started out in the sleaziest part of show business – strip clubs, where he was supposed to do just little pieces of his act in between strippers – and though he’d dropped out of high school in his freshman year he was hailed as an intellectual satirist. One of the running themes of his work was that when he was starting out as a comedian he’d constantly be warned to avoid dirty humor in his act and even be praised for working “clean” and avoiding “dirty-toilet jokes” – which led him, according to his own account, to start wondering, “How dirty is my toilet?” Given that he’d started out in strip clubs and his wife had been a stripper, Bruce was actually quite comfortable with sexually explicit material, and he gradually came to realize that the insane strictures put on Americans’ ability to talk about sex by the arbiters of “social propriety” were at the root of Americans’ misery and both sexual and psychological frustration.

Lenny Bruce was a harbinger of comedians to come; though he was only allowed on American TV six times (generally by people like Hugh Hefner and Steve Allen who were friends of his), it’s impossible to imagine Saturday Night Live existing without his example, and the first Saturday Night Live episode was hosted by the comedian who, more than any other, took over Bruce’s mantle of attacking America for its sexual and political hypocrisies: George Carlin. Lenny fits in with the canon of Fosse’s movies (it was preceded by Sweet Charity, 1968; and Cabaret, 1971; and followed by the overrated All That Jazz, 1979; and the woefully underrated Star 80, 1983) in that all are about show-business careers that go wrong, often horrendously so. Fosse chose to shoot the film in black-and-white, which helps give it an authentic 1950’s “look,” even though his choice for cinematographer was Bruce Surtees, son of Robert Surtees, best known for lavish color extravaganzae including the 1959 Ben-Hur. The elder Surtees shot films for director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood, and this gave the younger Surtees the chance to “make his bones” as a cameraman on Eastwood’s films, including Play Misty for Me, Eastwood’s first film as his own director. Also an inspired choice on Fosse’s part was his selection as composer: Ralph Burns, who’d previously been a piano player and arranger for Woody Herman’s “First Herd” in the mid-1940’s and was therefore intimately familiar with the milieu of jazz clubs in which Lenny Bruce did some of his best and most important performing.

Lenny is also a cautionary tale of a potentially great mind destroyed by drugs: Lenny and Honey are depicted as both continually on the edge of being “strung out” and Valerie Perrine’s performance as Honey strikes me as quite similar to Janis Joplin’s stoned affect in most of the surviving interview footage of her. There’s also a fascinating bit of casting; “Sherman Hart,” the established Catskills comic who praises Bruce for working “clean” (he’s a fictional character but clearly based on Milton Berle), is played by, of all people, Gary Morton, Lucille Ball’s second husband. And the film is staged as a series of periodic flashbacks interspersed with tape-recorded interviews with Honey Harlowe Bruce, Sally Marr, and Lenny Bruce’s personal manager Artie Silver (Stanley Beck), so it’s non-linear but not obtrusively or confusingly so. Though it has in common with other movies about famous junkies a sort of train-wreck attitude – we watch, helpless to do anything about it, as a basically sympathetic character hurtles towards a substance-fueled self-destruction (an experience I’ve had in my own life as well; I’ve lost a former partner and several close friends to the ravages of alcohol and/or drugs) – Lenny is still a great movie; it won several Academy Award nominations and only the fact that it came out the same year as The Godfather, Part II kept it from cleaning up at the Oscars.