Being awkward on the edge of the Roaring Twenties

I neither saw The Shining, nor read the book.  No disrespect to Stephen King - horror just isn't my thing.  The Resident Fan Boy, in the face of my resistance, went to see it in the company of Double Leo Sister, who found it amusing to lean into him at various points of the movie, and hiss:  "Boo!"  (Seeing films with my sister is, on the whole, a bad idea.)

Every single obituary for Shelly Duvall last week began with some variation on "best known for The Shining".  Non-horror fans could see her in a variety of films, usually with a quirky aspect.  She was pretty quirky.

My favourite of these was a made-for-television adaptation of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, which was on repeat on PBS stations in the eighties and nineties.  It first aired in 1976 as part of a series called The American Short Story, evidently aimed at college students.  This was, after all, only six years after PBS emerged from the former NET (National Education Television).

Anyway, I went looking online, and found a couple of reasonably clear full-length recordings, to see if I still liked it.  

I did.

Along with Shelley Duvall as Bernice, the 18-year-old small-town, socially inept rich girl, we have Veronica Cartwright (13 years after The Birds and three years before Alien - if we're keeping with the horror film trope) as her 18-year-old small-city socially successful wealthy cousin Marjorie.  It's sort of F Scott Fitzgerald's version of Pygmalion.  I read the short story (also freely available online) for the first time a couple of nights ago.  Published in 1920, it's sly and gentle satire.

The 1976 television version (there was also a 1951 production starring Julie Harris) expands on the short story, because it has to, in order to fill the hour.  The late Joan Micklin Silver directed this, but also wrote the screenplay, adding lovely touches as the jellybeans the young women sneak to social gatherings to use as lipstick (a detail not in the short story), and supplying further steps to Marjorie's coaching of Bernice into a daring girl about to be launched into college and dating, with disastrous results, of course.

The biggest change is the fleshing out of the character of Warren, who, in the short story, is your garden-variety handsome Yale sophomore.  Played by Bud Cort (who appeared with Shelley Duvall in her first film Brewster McCloud - directed by Robert Altman in 1970), Warren is transformed into a rather stodgy young man, whose self-involvement is hilariously highlighted in this exchange, which is also not in the short story.

Like most television dramas of the seventies, eighties, and even into the nineties, BBHH is slower paced than we've become used to in this century, but it has high production values, witty writing, and an excellent cast.  It's an illustration of Shelley Duvall's range as a performer, and no one loses their life.

There is a loss of face -- and a couple of scalpings.