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"We need stories about relationships between people. Real relationships that confront the normalcy of life. There's a difference between opportunistic eroticism and the eroticism of truth."
Karen Black, the most delightful piece of Five Easy Pieces, agrees. "Sex is a good subject," she says. "But if your sense of sex is covert and your ideas about sex bring an aberrated gleam to your eye, the scene is going to be below my level of acceptability." How's that again? "Sexuality has more to do with it than just going to bed with someone. It has to do with loving, listening, touching, making the other person happy." Joanna Shimkus (The Virgin and the Gypsy) is, like Ali MacGraw, a model turned actress—with a special, highly charged screen presence. She, too, is part of the new romanticism. "I'm old-fashioned," she insists. "I don't believe in promiscuity. I don't believe in drugs. Anything that feels as good as pot must be bad for you. I believe in love. I guess at heart I'm a pure romantic. I believe a woman's place is in the home."
Sarah Miles not only endorses the new romanticism; she is part of it in the overblown Ryan's Daughter, a love story set in troubled Ireland, that was written by her husband, Robert Bolt. "The critics are panning the movie," she admits, "but people desperately want it because they're pouring into the box office. I think people are weary of all the sex stuff. They want a story, which they're not getting at the moment. I believe in the film because I'm a romantic to the end. I believe in morality; I believe in right and wrong and not doing your own thing. I believe in working for marriage."
The problem in the '70s will not be enough players. Where there are beautiful women, men can always be found. Far more threatening to the reviving industry is a misreading of the entrails, a miscalculation of public opinion. To return to the stereotypical Joan Crawford flick ("Let me alone, Paul, I'm a lost crusade") would be to drown in a sea of sorghum, to turn off the young, the middle-aged and the old. To generations brought up on television, every plot is known; to a sexually liberated society, every shock has been felt or consciously bypassed.
Volcanic Desire
The lesson of Love Story's incredible success lies in its ties to romanticism, in its simple—and simple-minded—refusal to swing, in its ability to entertain. That it seems to herald a return to old-fashioned film making is not necessarily bad news for new film makers. In a dying industry, there is no room for anyone; in a boom town, everybody works. Love Story can only bring grief if it is treated like a new I Sound of Music, the film that was responsible for such trendy megaton disasters as Sweet Charity, On a Clear Day and Paint Your Wagon.
Gordon Stulberg, president of