So for some time now I’ve been working my way through a great website that is a partial archive of episodes of Siskel & Ebert -from the start of their program in 1975 through its various incarnations up to Siskel’s tragic passing in 1998, and even through the post-Siskel years and last few post-Ebert years to its exhausted conclusion. It’s great, and I highly recommend it for film and film criticism fans -I just finished the 70s! And there’s one movie that kept coming up -in their initial review, their best of 1978 countdown, even their best of the decade list- that I have rarely heard about since. A movie by Paul Mazursky called An Unmarried Woman. So naturally, I had to find and watch it.
An Unmarried Woman was something of a sensation when it came out: highly acclaimed, hugely successful, nominated for three Academy Awards, and a breakout for its star Jill Clayburgh -whose Best Actress loss to Jane Fonda for Coming Home was considered by many to be a major Oscars upset (she’d previously won the equivalent accolade at Cannes). But for such a huge deal in the immediate time it came out in, it hasn’t been much remembered alongside the other major movie milestones of that decade -and I would argue that it is one. What happened to stagnate the cultural impact of this movie? Was it simply its drab title? Or the fact it’s star draw herself fell off the cultural radar within a few years? Certainly, it’s not to do with the movie’s quality or the talents of anyone involved -it is still raw, powerful, and even relevant. A 70s feminism movie that was in fact a little ahead of the curve.
It’s the kind of premise that would almost become a staple of indie comedy-dramas in the following few decades. Clayburgh’s Erica Benton, an average middle-class New Yorker working at an art gallery, sees her life upended when her husband of sixteen years leaves her for his younger mistress. The film then follows her adjustment and independent self-discovery as she goes to therapy, raises her teenage daughter alone, and mulls over potential new romances assessing in them what is best for herself, possibly for the first time in her life.
Going back to those raves from Siskel and Ebert, what struck them so much about An Unmarried Woman was its simplicity and honesty -and that certainly comes through. Maybe in a post-Richard Linklater/ Noah Baumbach/ Kelly Reichert world, it’s not so impressively authentic a take on real life, the patterns of naturalistic human behaviour and dialogue, but it is certainly a degree less “Hollywood” than what was so popular even during that New Hollywood Golden Age. In both script and performance there is a tangible casualness to the rhythms of dialogue -any time Erica goes out with her friends and their talk evolves from personal relationships to being about bigger ideas, like in one great sequence where they converse on the apparent devaluing of women movie stars, belittling Barbra Streisand or Jane Fonda (who was at one point considered for Erica) against the last generation titans of Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn. Erica’s therapy sessions can be filled out with meandering and the kinds of uncertainty for words and emotions that feel so much closer to true life than a strictly articulated speech.
It’s all heavily and intricately scripted of course by Mazursky, who forewent hiring an actual unmarried woman screenwriter as he should have. However, the interviews he conducted did result in a decent enough substitute for a genuine woman’s voice -something he had shown an affinity for capturing before on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. It honestly accounts for both the broader themes of social and cultural womanhood at that time and captures something of a specific attitude towards a very specific circumstance. And as the mouthpiece, Mazursky made the right call with the relatively little-known Clayburgh -delivering on that sense of authenticity perfectly and making it her own. She taps into a lot of highly specific details in Erica’s behaviour, in the way she processes things especially. There’s something wonderfully unique to the way the film plays her husband Martin (Michael Murphy) breaking the news to her -where he is very emotionally distraught while she is rigid in her shock, her sharp anger eventually coming out in brusqueness. Movies like this tend to favour their big eruptions, but here there’s something exquisitely honest to Erica’s mixture of fury and hurt -Clayburgh showing it with the utmost nuance. She doesn’t yell or cry but you can feel her breaking.
Of course we do eventually see her devastation in more emotionally overt terms -in her subsequent therapy sessions most notably, where she both is made to reflect on her relationship and assess where and how she can go about her life after it. But it is notable that she adapts very well to an independent lifestyle and the beginnings of discovering her autonomy; and in fact one of the key takeaways from her therapy is encouragement to rejoin the dating scene after a time. It's an aspect of therapy that feels at the very least dated if not outright misguided. Though it's appropriate for Mazursky's purposes of wanting to highlight Erica's autonomy against romance, against men in her life. In this respect too, the movie is impressively modern.
Consider her reluctant blind date, who insists on sharing a cab ride home after an awkward lunch with her friends: a guy who appears to be attracted to her assertiveness, who tries to persuade her in seeming good faith to see him again (for her part she returns a mutual respect and conversational engagement in spite of herself); and yet when these and his flattering comments don't apparently go anywhere he forces himself on her -resulting in her angry impromptu exit from the cab. It's behaviour of a distinctly relatable kind on both ends, that I'm sure many single women of today would recognize just as well.
Others would perhaps find her one-night stand with an obnoxious work colleague out of sheer bored sexual urge relatable -the very fact the movie is interested in a woman's sexual drive, and a woman pushing forty at that (in the narrative at least, Clayburgh was just thirty-three), is somewhat new and radical. And in this encounter especially, she is the authority in the relationship, dictating its purpose and limits with a dreary confidence.
And yet I wouldn't have it sound like the movie is merely a series of bland second-wave feminism tropes on reversed sexual dynamics, vague feminine empowerment, and making it on your own. It's the very fact that these themes are treated as a given by the script, normalized by it, that makes it stand out. Erica is no stand-in for an archetype either, she is a deeply interesting character with her own underlying complex relationship to these values. She is an independent, unmarried woman... but she does need a man. She craves affection and a partner of true equality.
Enter Alan Bates, delightfully affable and charming, as scruffy abstract artist Saul Kaplan, with whom Erica hits it off with in again a beautifully natural way. And I do mean 'enter' in a literal sense, as Saul comes into the movie fully articulated without formal introduction -he's already been involved with Erica's art gallery for a while and the inklings of their relationship have been set by the time of his first scene. Their relationship, which only comprises the last act of the movie, is quite heartwarming and thrilling; as they develop a flirtatious rapport, as Saul is introduced to Erica's sceptical daughter Patti (Lisa Lucas) -throughout the movie her own image of free-thinking 70s feminism, and invites Erica to stay the summer with him in Vermont. The level of respect and mutual admiration is tangibly different than Erica has had with any other man in the movie -unlike the taxi guy earlier, Saul legitimately does love her for her priorities of autonomy.
Mazursky does too, and so her romance with Saul doesn't track in a conventional way. The movie may not explore her career in much depth, but its importance to her is communicated, as are her obligations to, among others, Patti. Her story doesn't end then on some contrived note. In spite of his pleading, she stands firm with Saul on her commitments in the city -just as she had been firm with Martin, who pops up again to reveal the affair fizzled out and he now pathetically wants her back. Of course this attempted reconciliation amounts to nothing for her. Turning down Saul though does, but the two part on beautiful bittersweet terms -and with an implication that it’s not the end for them. Mazursky leaves his audience with the most indie rom-com of endings, as Saul tricks Erica into helping him move a great elaborate painting only to reveal it as a gift, leaving Erica wandering through Manhattan carrying a giant canvas.
There is some sidling away from that realism here, but the film maintains its virtues in doing so. Even as the change happened gradually and internally, Erica is a freer, more fulfilled person by the end of the movie. And she wasn’t required to give up romance to be a modern independent woman as might have been the feminist stereotype at the time. It’s wonderful to see, and I understand why An Unmarried Woman so captivated audiences and critics in 1978 -even Pauline Kael raved about it and its seemingly untapped honesty. Clayburgh’s star career sadly fizzled out -she won another Oscar nomination the following year for Alan J. Pakula’s Starting Over, but in the following decade was never able to reach the heights of An Unmarried Woman again, mostly returning to the stage and only appearing in movies in minor roles (her last appearance before her death in 2010 was as Kristin Wiig’s mother in Bridesmaids). But she turned out one of the great breakthrough performances of the 1970s here, and An Unmarried Woman, for as specific to its times as it is, has a modern streak to its style and feminist sensibilities. And it should be regarded still as more of a classic of that decade than it is.
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