Lord Love a Duck (George Axelrod, 1966)

[domino harvey]

I had added this to my queue a couple years ago after it popped up on one of Rosenbaum's lists and after enjoying Tuesday Weld in the amazing Pretty Poison (which is the best Chabrol film Chabrol never made), I bumped this one up. However, watching Lord Love a Duck was like getting blitzed for two hours and I'm still seeing the bright white flashes. I need a hand to guide me back here. It's been a long week and this movie basically broke my brain.

I get that the entire film rests somewhere between non-sequitur and satire, but the intentional disconnect between tone(s) and intent, between narrative and commentary, between performance and purpose... Axelrod purposely makes the material mesh in an unsatisfactory way, particularly as it enters the anticlimactic homestretch, but this doesn't feel like a fault so much as a tactic that I can't come to grips with yet. I'm certain that nothing this peculiar could be so on accident.

[Cold Bishop]

Oh harvey, you're such a drag!

I've seen the movie a few times, and I still don't know what to make of it. But it 's certainly a strange, and unapologetically audacious beast. The sweater scene has been seared in my retinas ("Perriwinkle pussycat!"), and in two minutes, is ballsier than the whole of Kubrick's Lolita.

[domino harvey]

The sweater scene has been seared in my retinas ("Perriwinkle pussycat!")

If I can be sure of anything in this life, it's that I'll never forget that scene for as long as I live

[Props55]

LORD LOVE A DUCK is indeed one strange cinematic beast so I'm not surprised that even you found it difficult to wrap your brain around, domino. Imagine discovering it on network television in prime time at around age 14! It was two hours of WTF before I knew just WTF WTF was. And puctuated by more odes to consumerist culture, i.e. 60's commercials. Everyone remembers the sweater scene!

There's a wonderfully candid interview with Axelrod in Film Comment circa late 70's and he talks about the horrible time he had making the film. The cameraman, Lionel Lindon, hated the film ("why are they screaming these colors in a B/W film?") and Axelrod suspects he deliberately never told him about the TV cutoff regarding microphones in the shot. That's one "Pirandellian" effect he claims was unintentional!
Ironically that probably won't be an issue with the DVD as it's undoubtedly hard matted. Those microphones were ubiquitous in the TV broadcasts and non-theatrical prints and definitely added another layer to an already heady mix.

Dammit, now I gotta Netflix this ASAP!

[Camera Obscura]

Lord Love a Duck is great fun, if only for Tuesday Weld's shining presence. She's even better in the still criminally underseen Pretty Poison.

[therewillbeblus]

This wild absurdist farce is impossible to pin down, as it moves in a disconnected internal logic that best fits into the schema of our dreams. Except the unpredictable and nonsensical content thrives on unsettling communication breakdowns that also resemble horrific nightmares, enough to disbar from a secure tone and become its own beast entirely. The vibe isn’t always playful or entertaining (although it morphs into new dimensions of both when you acclimate to its wavelength) with dense cryptic exchanges and technical choices eliminating the flow of a pure fun zippy attitude in favor of utter destruction of expectations and comfort. Human behavior has never been so erratically conveyed by its relationship to style and content, with even what should be a nouvelle vague kittenish beach party lingering for so long on bizarre dances that I felt emerging chills down my spine as if I was in alien territory.

This may be the weirdest movie I’ve ever seen, and I don’t make that comment lightly. The narrative initially plays like an externalization of McDowall’s solipsism in how he views our society, but as it drags on it becomes apparent that it’s actually a milieu that allows his warped persona to fit right in! Or maybe it’s something else entirely, a smorgasbord of disconnected ideas, unbearable dysphoria and liberated sanity, crammed into one place. Weld goes toe-to-toe with McDowall’s psychotic puppeteer, allowing her sensual unreadability to respond with an enigmatic equivalence, as she would a few years later in Pretty Poison. And yes- the sweater scene is just one of those “holy shit” moments that nobody should spoil, though I don’t know if I could if I tried.

This is the valley where psychological deterioration, social commentary, and poisonous comedy all come to awkwardly mingle. Illogical relationships between communication tools and banal signifiers are rampant (the math equation of how to exploit daddy's love!) and there are no boundaries for manipulation of people and constructs of the medium. No group is spared as everyone and everything in our culture is set on fire, adults and adolescents alike. The mood continues to fluctuate into disorienting territory and, in a shuddering scene, stalls on some disturbing emotional turmoil around unexpected familial death in the last act, before weaving through sedate motions and eventually somersaulting back into pandemonium. I absolutely loved it.