Jonathan Demme spent his career in a chameleonic quest to be impossible to pin down. The unfortunate thing in terms of that particular pursuit is that his empathy for humanity shone through every last one of his films, uniting them in a damn impressive filmography that runs the gamut of humankind and human kindness. From 1974 until he left us in 2017, Demme churned out 70 feature films, documentaries, concert films, music videos, episodes of television, and short films. Along the way he won himself an Oscar andeight of his collaborators—including four actors—won Oscars for their work on his films.
Demme's signature shot features his actors looking straight down the lens of the camera, staring not just at the character they are sharing the scene with, but by extension the audience themselves. It's used for myriad reasons—to chillyourbones by looking into Hannibal Lecter's eyes in Silence of the Lambs or to garner empathy for wronged AIDS victim Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia. In his later years, he began using handheld cameras to great effect, once more immersing viewers in the world of his films in a completely new way.
A lover of cinema himself, Demme was a champion of lesser known films from around the world, using the Jacobs Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY to bring many of them to new audiences. He served as mentor to filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson—who dedicated 2017's Phantom Thread to Demme—and helped to broaden the horizons of many by exposing people to a wide variety of subjects. In that regard, Demme did successfully chameleonize himself by working in nearly every genre imaginable.
He began his career—as did many of his contemporaries like Coppola, Scorsese, and Ron Howard—in the Roger Corman family of low budget, down and dirty exploitation cinema. He cut his teeth on women in prison and hillbilly revenge stories before graduating to broad comedy before reinventing himself as an actor's director who could help reinvigorate, reinvent, or kickstart their career. He had a stock company of supporting actors he picked up in these days including Charles Napier, Tracey Walter, Kenneth Utt, Harry Northup, and even Corman himself. Great character actors with great, recognizable faces, that brought a realism and truth to nearly every Demme film in which they appeared.
With one foot always in the world of exploitation cinema, Demme embraced nudity in his films, particularly early on when he was toiling in those various exploitational genres. As time went on, he used nudity less and less—only one film we're covering today came after the release of 1991's Silence of the Lambs—but it's explosive at the front end of his career, starting with his very first film...
Caged Heat (1974)
After writing and producing the bikermovie Angels Hard as They Come and the women in prison flick The Hot Box for director Joe Viola, Demme stepped into the director's chair for the first time on another pink-in-the-clink flick, Caged Heat. Never one to shy away from inserting his politics into his scripts, Demme took the step of casting a woman (Barbara Steele) in the role of the sadistic warden of the women's prison, a decision that helped the film stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Erica Gavin—the busty breakout star of Russ Meyer's films Vixen! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—is the audience surrogate Jacqueline, sentenced to women's prison for selling dope. The prison is run by the authoritarian Supt. McQueen (Steele) and her nefarious cohort Dr. Randolph (Warren Miller), who regularly subjects the girls (like poor Roberta Collins) to all manner of sexual torture...
Jacqueline attempts to rally the other prisoners—including 70s exploitation favorite Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith—to the notion that together, they're stronger and can overthrow the crooked warden. But first, the showers...
It is what it is, but it's also above average for the genre and the time period. The film would spawn a Demme-less sequel20 years later, followed by Caged Heat 3000 in 1995. Unfortunately the director never went on the record about either in his lifetime. The film's $180,000 budget ensured it turned a profit and gave Demme the opportunity to court bigger stars, and thus a bigger budget, for his next film...
Crazy Mama (1975)
Although she has toiled—brilliantly, I might add—in comedy for over a generation now, people forget that Cloris Leachman studied at The Actor's Studio under Elia Kazan, and her career was coming hot off an Oscar win for Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show.1974's Young Frankenstein sent her down the path toward the comedy legends she'd be forever associated with like Mel Brooks and Mary Tyler Moore, winning a Golden Globe and 8 Primetime Emmy Awards along the way. The one oddity on her resume during this stretch in her career is thiscarbon copy of the prior year's Big Bad Mama starring Angie Dickinson, but she does show her bare ass in the flick...
Originally set to be directed by underground sensation Shirley Clarke, Demme was pulled off of what would turn out to be his next film, Fighting Mad, to right the ship on this production. Roger Corman's wifeJulie was serving as producer on this film and didn't like the direction Clarke was taking. Demme was now seen as a steadying force in Corman's stable of directors, a reputation that would eventually help him secure financing outside of Corman's sphere of influence. In the meantime, he was working with terrific character actors like Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo, Gilligan's Island), Dick Miller (Gremlins), and Happy Days legend Don Most! Ralph Malph is at the center of the PG-rated film's other nude scene, when the door is opened near where he's sitting to reveal TA from a changing Linda Purl...
Last Embrace (1979)
Now free of Corman's influence, Demme began to edge away from exploitation and slide toward respectability with this Hitchcock-ian 1979 thriller starring Roy Scheider—who would earn an Oscar nomination for his performance in that same year'sAll That Jazz. Like another film with Scheider in a much smaller role, John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, the film weirdly traffics in Judaica and Jewish ceremonial killings. With an ace supporting cast including Christopher Walken, John Glover, and Ghostbusters' Mayor David Margulies, the film is a real slow burner. Real slow.
Speaking of Ghostbusters, the late Janet Margolin played the prosecutor who gets carried out of court by one of the Scolari Brothers in Ghostbusters II, and here plays the woman murdering men close to Scheider's government agent Harry Hannan. She is seeking revenge against the men who sold her grandmother into sex slavery, and Harry puts the pieces together in time to find her at a motel in Niagara Falls where she has just seduced and murdered her latest victim...
Earlier in the film, sheshocks Scheider when she turns up in his shower, having sublet his apartment when his landlord thought he was out of the country...
The film is certainly competently made and has a killer climax—literally—but in hindsight it's more of a stepping stone to better things.
Melvin and Howard (1980)
In the first of several times he would cast him in one of his films, Demme got Jason Robards to play the elusive Howard Hughes in this melancholy comedy about a dreamer who just can't catch a break, even when life throws him the biggest bone of all time. Paul Le Mat (whom we just discussed last week for his work in Full Moon's Puppet Master) plays the other half of the titular pair, a down-on-his-luck loser who happens upon an injured Hughes in the desert one day. He drives the old man, unaware of his identity, back to his home at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, thinking nothing of the encounter and moving on with his life.
The film seems to forget about this as well, as it spends the better part of the next hour in the company of Melvin and his long-suffering wife Lynda, played by Mary Steenburgen in an Oscar winning performance. More or less trapped into her marriage with Melvin because he knocked her up, Lynda takes a job as a waitress in a topless bar and, sick of the constant harassment from the customers to take off her clothes, quits her job in epic fashion by taking off her clothes and storming out completely nude...
After winning $10,000 on a game show that he convinces her to go on, Lynda eventually leaves Melvin after he squanders her winnings. Melvin moves on to his much more sympathetic second wife Bonnie, with whom he opens a small service station in the middle of nowhere Utah. It's here that Melvin's life is changed when he is presented with a letter stating that he was mentioned as a benefactor in the will of Howard Hughes, who bequeathed him $156 million for giving him a ride home all those years ago. Thus ensues a long and costly court battle that consumes the next several years of Melvin's life, as he fights to prove he's entitled to the money.
It's a truly winning little film with a fantastic, star-making turn by Steenburgen, who more than deserved her Oscar for such a small, under-seen little movie. Robards also picked up a Supporting Actor nomination—though he had just won consecutive awards in that category three years earlier—and screenwriter Bo Goldman would pick up his first of two Oscars for his work with Demme. A film worth seeking out, particularly if you're unfamiliar with it.
Something Wild (1986)
Easily one of the most underrated comedies of the 80s with a star-making film debut from Ray Liotta, 1986's Something Wild is the first of two consecutive "broad" comedies that earnedDemme a minor reputation as a comedy guy. Melanie Griffith, hot off of De Palma's Body Double, is starting to show shades of the firecracker talent that would earn her an Oscar nomination two years later for Mike Nichols' Working Girlas the sexed up Audrey, who kidnaps Jeff Daniels' buttoned down businessman Charlie for a weekend sexcapade.
Locking themselves in a motel room posing as a married couple, Audrey—going by the name Lulu—rips off her top, having tied Charlie to the bed...
She even attempts to get him fired when she takes a business call for him...
While it seems that things couldn't possibly get worse for Charlie, worse things are heading his way courtesy of Lulu's violent ex-con ex-husband Ray (Liotta). All three leads picked up Golden Globe nominations for their stellar work here, and the film endures thanks to their performances, Demme's direction, and a crackerjack script with lots of great twists by E. Max Frye (Palmetto, Foxcatcher). While it's now viewed as minor Demme, it really shows not just how good his grasp on comedy had become, but what a great filmmaker he was becoming in his own right.
Married to the Mob (1988)
The yuks continue with this even broader comedy from two years later—with Spalding Gray's monologue film Swimming to Cambodia sandwiched between them—featuring a central performance from Michelle Pfeiffer that helped skyrocket her to leading lady stardom. Pfeiffer plays Angela, the mob wife of notorious lothario mobster Frank "The Cucumber" DeMarco (Alec Baldwin, appropriately scuzzy here). After Frank gets killed, Angela sees this as her way out of a life she hates, surrounded by mafia wives she despises. However, two simultaneous events keep her from leaving the life entirely.
First, Frank's boss Tony "The Tiger" Russo (an Oscar nominated Dean Stockwell) sees Frank's death as an opportunity to move in on Angela and make her his new mistress. Second, the FBI begins surveilling her, with undercover agent Mike Downey (Matthew Modine) attempting to get her to flip on Tony by posing as her next door neighbor. It's a complicated web that's woven by co-writers Barry Strugatz and Mark Burns, whose only other credit is the following year's even broader comedy She-Devil starring Roseanne and Meryl Streep in a battle for the affections of Ed Begley, Jr.
Nancy Travis pops up early in the flick as Tony's current mistress Karen, with whom The Cucumber had been caught earlier in the film, leading to his demise. After getting a goodbye kiss from a nude Travis...
Tony dispatches of her in a jacuzzi, because he's not one to let things go lightly...
While Pfeiffer had some success sharing the spotlight in flicks like The Witches of Eastwick and Into the Night, she wasn't a star until this film came out the same year as Tequila Sunrise and Dangerous Liaisons, showing her incredible range and earning her first Oscar nomination for the latter. She was Demme's first choice for the role of Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, butthat obviously didn't happen and sadly the two never worked together again.
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
In the 20 years between Married to the Mob and this flick, Demme went from Oscar golden boy with Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, to suffering the biggest box office bomb of his career with Beloved in 1998. Then he made back to back remakes of beloved films of the 60s, turning Stanley Donen's Charade into the barely watchable The Truth About Charlie and faring slightly better with a 2004 remake of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, reuniting him with Denzel Washington.
Demme made a fairly radical stylistic departure with Rachel Getting Married, however, ditching his usually steady camera for a handheld aesthetic that placed the audience in the middle of the characters' chaos. Anne Hathaway earned her first Oscar nomination in the role of Kym, the drug-addicted black sheep of a middle class suburban family, who is given a weekend pass from rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Like the proverbial bull in the china shop that is her family, Kym wreaks havoc on all of the various wedding festivities, but Demme finds time for tender moments between the sisters.
On the morning of the wedding, Rachel helps her sister get ready in the tub, helping her wash and shave, and giving us a couple quick looks at Hathaway's breasts...
This humanity is the thing that Demme got at better than many of his contemporaries and is absolutely the thing that separated him from the pack. One thing I know for sure is that he is, and will continue to be, missed.
Jonathan Demme Movies with Nudity Not Covered in This Column
—The Truth About Charlie (2002)
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
—Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part One
—Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Two
—Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Three
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Non-nude images courtesy of IMDb
