MAHOGANY Directed by BERRY GORDY Screenplay by JOHN BYRUM
So it shouldn't be a total loss, Mahogany contains one pearl: a romantic interlude between Diana Ross and Anthony Perkins. Ross appears as Tracy, a poor girl from the Chicago ghetto who has made it big as a model in Rome. Perkins plays Sean, a former combat correspondent who has made it big as a fashion photographer. Sean's sexuality remains moot through much of the film —until the moment when he forces a chilly Tracy down on a bed and mutters, "I understand the needs of a woman."
Cut to next scene: a tight closeup of Perkins lying wide-eyed and morose, staring at the ceiling. Ross raises herself on one elbow and consoles him with the hollow reassurance of a nurse returning doom-laden X rays. "Don't worry," she sighs, "it's not the most important thing in the world."
The equally unimportant Mahogany, blatantly concocted as a sequel to Miss Ross's success in Lady Sings the Blues, owes a great deal to John Schlesinger's Darling (1965). Indeed, its debt is so considerable that Perkins, who performs with wit, takes to addressing Miss Ross as "D-a-r-r-1-l-i-n-n-g," stretching the syllables to the breaking point. Miss Ross, however, is no Julie Christie. She may be more persuasive as the fictive Tracy than as the authentic Billie Holiday. But she remains an uneasy actress who pushes everything past endurance —including the audience. Ross laughs eagerly but never with a semblance of spontaneity, weeps without sorrow and rages without passion.
Movies as frantically bad as Mahogany can be enjoyed on at least one level: the spectacle of a lot of people making fools of themselves. The film marks the directorial debut of Berry Gordy, the Motown Records whiz, who has slapped scenes together as if he were laying down tracks for an album: one fast, one slow, one happy, one sad, one up, one down. Gordy has also permitted Miss Ross to design her own wardrobe, a series of costumes apparently inspired by some Oriental version of Star Trek.
The movie comes down hard on the notion of its heroine's overweening ambition and demonstrates that a good girl has no time for all those fancy European airs when she could be back in the ghetto, helping her man (the agreeable Billy Dee Williams) win political office. For Mahogany, that kind of moral—cynical, and wholly bogus—is the perfect clincher. Jay Cocks
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