New Movies: Rachel, Rachel

The spinster has always been a haunting and rather mysterious figure: no man quite knows her. Victorian writers characterized her as a religious zealot or an anxious nanny. In the post-analytical theater, Playwrights William Inge and Tennessee Williams toss her about like a sex bomb on a short fuse —guaranteed to explode somewhere in the second act. Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Spinster and Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God show the bomb defused. Both novels capture the faded maiden in dignity and pathos. She is as obsolete as an antimacassar—and as real as the reader.

Rachel, Rachel is A Jest of God reborn as a film, with all of the novel’s considerable virtues and flaws. One virtue exclusive to the movie is Joanne Woodward, an actress who inhabits her part as a soul does a body.

Paperback Freud. Rachel stands in the “exact middle” of her existence: she is 35. She is also at dead center, emotionally inert. Like a cold moon, she rotates around her widowed mother, reflecting all of Mamma’s neuroses and ailments. When parents and children stay together too long, the relationship slips into reverse. Edging toward middle age Rachel becomes an adolescent. She seeks solace in masturbation, the first refuge of the child, the last hiding place of the isolated. Like a teen-ager making tentative explorations, she writhes with a suffocating guilt and murmurs to herself, “It’s just to make me sleep.”

The past beckons like a man, and ritualistically, she riffles through the consolations and terrors of her childhood. Her only affection is for her forbidding Scottish father, who flashes by like something seen from a speeding train. He was an undertaker by profession, and so she also associates him with punishment and death. Sometimes her involuntary memory plunges into the future, and she wishfully imagines that she is cramming sleeping pills into her mother’s mouth. It all smacks of paperback Freud—and so it could have been.

But Rachel the character and Rachel the film are illuminated by the intrusion of characters with the dimensions and plausibility of small-town people with small-town attitudes. They are the kind of faceless individuals whom no one notices until one of them murders, or inherits a fortune, or becomes a vice president. A fellow schoolmarm extends a lesbian hand that Rachel shakes off. A visitor (James Olson) “looking for a little action” finds some in Rachel, but he vanishes before she realizes that she has been had. Even her body thwarts her: a swelling in her stomach turns out to be not a pregnancy but a noncancerous tumor. It is the only benign thing that has ever happened to her.

Though in the end there is an attempt to reassert a feeble ego, Rachel, Rachel is for the most part a chronicle of defeat. All that women like Rachel can possibly hope for is some kind of separate peace with their minds. Unfortunately, for their glands and hearts, it just may be too late.

Hunted Animal. The movie marks Paul Newman’s debut at the other end of the camera. Since he could not find a director who liked the script, Newman decided to do the job himself. “What the hell,” he said, “I majored in directing at the Yale Drama School.” Disdaining the usual directorial flourishes, he told his crew, Rachel-style: “I’m a virgin and I need your help.” He coached Actress Woodward—his wife—in whispers and in a sort of private language. He had the camera dwell on her lovingly, so much so that one friend described the movie as Newman’s “wallet.” As a result, he infects the brief love affair with a tenuousness that everyone but Rachel can detect, and infuses the air of the small town with a palpable melancholy and unquiet desperation.

But when the action demands the kind of force that he always delivers as an actor, Newman pulls his punch lines. A half hippie, half religious revival meeting, for example, should have had the kick of LSD. Instead it dissipates and meanders between love and Haight-Ashbury. Moreover, Scenarist Stewart Stern often gets too close to the novel, adopting where he should adapt. Rachel is shackled with prosy monologues that should have been given visual form.

Despite its failings, Rachel, Rachel has several unassailable assets. The spiderweb score, written by Jerome Moross with the cooperation of Erik Satie and Robert Schumann, is the best of the year. Estelle Parsons, as Rachel’s fellow schoolteacher, and Frank Corsaro, as a friendly neighborhood mortician, extend their roles beyond the boundaries of the movie.

It is in the transcendent strength of Joanne Woodward that the film achieves a classic stature. There is no gesture too minor for her to master. She peers out at the world with the washed-out eyes of a hunted animal. Her walk is a ladylike retreat, a sign of a losing battle with time and diets and fashion. Her drab voice quavers with a brittle strength that can command a student but break before a parent’s will. By any reckoning, it is Actress Woodward’s best performance.