This Elaine May essay contains spoilers for A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky, Ishtar, Heaven Can Wait, The Birdcage and Primary Colors. Check out Vague Visages’ film essays section for more movie coverage.

Irony and satire are the weapons of the weak; they offer a lexicon for the impotent to exact a measure of revenge. Elaine May and Mike Nichols utilized this language as well as anyone. At a time when hypocrisies were ripe to be highlighted, the American filmmakers presaged a new comedic outlook which was unapologetically intelligent and socially aware. The double act’s best routines take pleasure in failures of communication, breakdowns of self-perception and the fragile pieties of bourgeois life at the dawn of the 1960s. Breaking out from the torpor of Dwight Eisenhower’s America, they said what had previously been unarticulated, offering a carefully orchestrated discord which concerned itself with tone — willfully erudite and daringly self-aware. But for all their adventurism, some limits remained intact, and they persisted into what became the counterculture sensibility. What happened to May when she parted ways with Nichols illustrates the sexism that was embedded into the New Hollywood movement that grew out of this cultural shift. For all the liberatory theatre of the era, the male gaze reigned supreme, and the old double standards held fast. While Nichols was allowed to rebound from directorial flops like Catch-22 (1970) and The Fortune (1975), May was banished at a time when male auteurs were granted an unprecedented amount of latitude. She was treated as a liability rather than a maverick, and it’s difficult not to read that assessment as gendered. As a woman, May didn’t have the privilege of being difficult.

A possible reason for May’s erasure is her unerring gift for pinpointing male weakness and exposing it with an unflinching eye; it could be argued that no other director of her generation delved so deeply into male pathology. She took as her subject the excesses of masculinity, its tawdry and farcical excrescences. Jokes arise out of grievances, and May’s directorial crash course with A New Leaf (1971) has the feel of a poison pen letter against the men who wield power, in the form of wealthy loafer Henry Graham (Walter Matthau). Graham initially takes a patriarchal interest in his temperamental sports car, and it soon becomes apparent that he treats everything in his life like a possession. When the protagonist is informed that he has run out of money and is about to join the ranks of the poor, he is reminded by his dutiful butler, Harold (George Rose), that “the only way to acquire properties without labor” is marriage. Graham has six weeks to find a suitable woman to marry, then murder. He is a man of “no skills, no resources, no ambitions” and is ill-equipped for the art of seduction; Graham is socially maladroit, sexually disinterested and emotionally detached. His courtship of “rich, single, isolated and clumsy” botanist Henrietta (Elaine May) is a catalogue of predatory lurches, with Graham straining to assemble some semblance of presentability in the interest of acquisition. Henrietta becomes the latest possession that the male protagonist will offload when she has outlived her value. In A New Leaf, May takes pains to draw a parallel between masculinity, capital and capture.

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Graham’s courtship of Henrietta is framed as a colonial venture; he describes the woman as “feral,” “primitive” and “a threat to Western civilization.” Graham reasons that he expropriates her assets to preserve his rightful position as the great male speculator. The male character sees the world in terms of class preservation; his money is the only thing which sanctions his disposition — wealth lends his disagreeable nature a patina of eccentric glamor. A New Leaf is a trenchant satire on the perversions of the wealthy. May’s screenplay posits capital as a male energy; it is the grease which keeps the patriarchy running smoothly. Graham has exhausted his funds and must replenish his vigor with the sacrifice of a born victim; he believes that Henrietta “doesn’t deserve to live,” she is a human resource to be mined. Graham makes it clear that “I don’t want to share things, I want to own them all by myself,” and as soon as the marriage is secured, he ruthlessly downsizes Henrietta’s lax, “democratic” household, assuming control of her life like a ruthless, calculating machine, devoid of any human impulse. May tells the tale of a woman subordinating herself to male ambition — a common occurrence in 70s Hollywood. When Henrietta discovers a new species of leaf, she names it after Graham. It seems like Matthau’s character has taken everything from Henrietta — it is simply a matter of dispatching the body, but May’s character ultimately prevails. Her will is stronger, and by the film’s denouement, she has captured Graham. Nature assails the male lead with all the vehemence it can muster, his pretense of individual strength succumbs to an understanding that he must co-operate to survive.

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Neil Simon and Bruce Jay Friedman’s screenplay for The Heartbreak Kid (1972) is ground zero for cringe comedy, and it’s not hard to see why its exploration of male obsession would resonate with May. It is another tale of male conquest, featuring a male character driven to destroy everything around him in the pursuit of his desires. Sporting goods salesman Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) is a newlywed who honeymoons with his bride, Lila Kolodny (Jeannie Berlin), in Miami Beach. Lenny sees marriage chiefly as a pathway to sex, and as soon as this has been secured, he begins to have doubts. When Lila is bedridden with sunburn, Lenny hits the beach alone and catches sight of Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), a vision of Goyish perfection whose contemptuous tone only serves to intensify his obsession. Lenny sees Kelly as a symbol of everything he has given up — the luminous promise of sexual adventure. On their way to Florida, Lila points out an elderly couple and tells Lenny that will be them in 50 years. Grodin’s character visibly recoils at the thought of this and is already looking for an off-ramp. The mythic Minnesota blonde is a siren drawing him toward a new, turbulent reality.

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Nobody does disingenuous like Grodin, and he exudes all the unctuous charm of a seasoned salesman when he meets Kelly’s father (Eddie Albert), an astute businessman who instantly sees through Lenny’s act. Like Graham, the male protagonist is an unwitting prisoner of his own objectives, and Kelly is more than happy to give him enough rope, watching his performance with detached amusement. Lenny is her “teddy bear” — a plaything who lends some color to a drab family holiday. Lenny is trapped in a world of appearances; Miami is a frontier of self-delusion which traps “a bunch of jerks” and drains them of their cash. Lenny sneers at the jerks as he blows up his fledgling marriage and sets out to insinuate himself into the Corcoran clan. There are two scenes in The Heartbreak Kid which set the template for an entirely new conception of comedy. In the first scene, Lenny lays out his situation to Mr. Corcoran, stating that “decency doesn’t always pay off” and that he is “a determined young man” who will go after what he wants.  Mr. Corcoran is astonished by what he hears and brands Lenny a “nut” and confides that “I don’t like one goddam thing about you.” The contrast between Grodin’s unbreakable poker face and Albert’s flustered incomprehension makes the scene as hilarious as it is tense. The second scene is where Lenny takes Lila to a restaurant and lays out where he stands, reassuring her that it’s just “a crummy annulment” and “it’s not the end of the world” as the world of Berlin’s character collapses around her. It is an odious but intriguing performance; the audacity of its grotesquerie is breathtaking. Lenny is an emotional assassin who sets off for the chilly Midwest in pursuit of Kelly, the plaything that won’t go away. He is willing to throw it all away, to lose everything for another shot at beauty, and there is no line of spin too glib to win the game. 

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The legend goes that May exposed as much film as Gone with the Wind (1939) in the making of Mikey and Nicky (1976); stories of its tortuous shooting became part of an overall narrative that directors had gained too much power. There is a valedictory mood to Mikey and Nicky, as it exists on the precipice of a new mindset in the industry that would sweep away small-scale examinations of humanity in favor of broad conceptual spectacles. Nicky (John Cassavetes) is a small-time hood who has a contract out on him; in his moment of need, he calls his old friend, Mikey (Peter Falk), who pulls him together and helps to get him out of his hotel room. As they navigate New York’s dark streets, they are pursued by a Mob hitman, Kinney (Ned Beatty), and it becomes increasingly unclear if Mikey is leading Nicky to safety or slaughter. May has a knack for capturing the dynamic of male relationships; in Mikey and Nicky, we see the two childhood friends taking a trip into the underworld. Over the course of their journey, they must reckon with the stability of the things that once bound them and lay to rest the people they were. Nicky is adamant that “I’m dead already. No-one can hurt me,” and there is a feeling of Mikey transporting a corpse. May presents Cassavetes’ character as a hysteric, presaging the kind of vulnerable male lead in a macho milieu that would become a staple of prestige TV in the early 00s, subverting the traditionally female coding of this character type. 

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While Mikey has settled into a safe suburban lifestyle, Nicky still chases the vibrancy of a life that has slipped into history without his noticing. He yearns to stop time, symbolized when he smashes Mikey’s watch, a gift from his father, the final link to a life he has left behind. Nicky tries to retreat into the womb by visiting his mother’s grave and luxuriating in signifiers of innocence, like lollipops and comic books. He is a wild boy who shirks his responsibilities and finds solace in trying to recreate the spirit of the playground. While Nicky’s wife and child are staying at her mother’s, he takes Mikey to one of his hook-ups, Nellie (Carol Grace). Cassavetes’ character is Mikey’s last link to a masculine realm he has traded in for domesticity, and he shares in the cruelty that Nicky heaps on Nellie, calling her a “psycho” and deriding her for listening to the news and reading. For a moment, they can both be wild boys again, leaving worldly concerns behind and grabbing whatever they can. But they and the inept professional on their tail are the latest entries in May’s catalogue of schmucks. The schmuck is a constant — the doomed striver whose pride will not allow him to step back from his errors. Mikey has grasped that he can no longer survive in the wild, but Nicky can’t give up the thrill of showing off, even when it leads him down a dead end. Nicky shows up on the doorstep of the suburban street where Mikey lives, declaring that “I’m sick” and demanding that Mikey get him a doctor, but time doesn’t indulge the wild boy’s febrile desires, and the hitman’s car creeps into view.

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The world wasn’t ready for Ishtar (1987), but it increasingly feels like the work which best articulates the absurdity of Iran-Contra, the War on Terror and the unravelling of empire. Songwriting duo Lyle Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Chuck Clarke (Dustin Hoffman) are the epitome of male mediocrity — they are told by their agent, Marty Freed (Jack Weston), that “you’re old, you’re white, you got no schtick.” But what they do have is an unassailable self-belief, in the face of universal indifference. Rogers and Clarke are May’s ultimate schmucks — valiant losers who refuse to surrender to the inevitable, carried on a tide of delusion. The dream cannot be allowed to die, even when Clarke is told “your life is a joke” by his girlfriend, Carol (Carol Kane), shortly before she walks out on him.  But neither man backs down from personal and professional failure, and when they are offered a gig in Morrocco, things seem to be looking up. However, the gig thrusts them into the middle of a civil war that neither they nor CIA agent Jim Harrison (Charles Grodin) seem to understand beyond their own cold war framing. Thus, schmucks at all levels of the command structure stumble from one convoluted fiasco to the next, inflaming local sentiment and determining the fate of the Middle East.

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Rogers and Clarke become a pair of holy schmucks, “two messengers” for the resistance fighting the corrupt Emir Yousef (Ahorn Ipalé), when they fall in with “left-wing agent” Shirra Assel (Isabelle Adjani). May takes great pleasure in placing the visibly middle-aged Beatty and Hoffman into macho adventures for which they are unequipped, Hope and Crosby dropped into the middle or Rambo III (1988). The joy of Ishtar is in this disjuncture; the leads gum up the plot mechanics at every turn, driven by their own solipsistic motives; the proverbial blind camel stumbling through the desert. They embody the relentless spirit of forward motion against all history, trapped in their own metaphor, wayward self-directed subjects stumbling into a mirage of destiny. When they run into a group of gun runners, Clarke convinces them he can speak the local dialect and begins communicating with the locals by wailing with the requisite conviction. It is a testament to the supremacy of hustle and bluster; he can alter the world around him by the force of his performance. Ishtar charts the triumph of the self-regarding artist. Rogers and Clarke are propelled by their dreams, undaunted by events; motives get tangled, the map ends up consuming the territory; the military-industrial complex reaches an agreement with the entertainment complex; the facile assumes equal gravity and the self-regarding artist’s conceit is indulged in the interest of political expediency. By virtue of unalloyed chutzpah, Rogers and Clarke defy the brutal calculus of their setting and fill a hero-shaped hole. 

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May’s preoccupation with flawed men who must reinvent or redeem themselves was carried over into her work as a writer. Her influence is apparent in the screenplay she co-wrote with Warren Beatty for Heaven Can Wait (1978). In this Ernst Lubitsch remake, Beatty plays Joe Pendleton, a pro footballer who is sent to Heaven prematurely and must return to Earth in the body of wealthy industrialist Leo Farnsworth. There are shades of Henry Graham in the character — he is a heartless exploiter who is in the process of being poisoned by his wife, Julia (Diane Cannon), and personal assistant, Tony Abbott (Charles Grodin). When Pendleton hops into his body, Julia describes him as “a lecherous, sadistic son of a bitch who everyone wanted dead.” Pendleton sets about getting Farnsworth into physical and spiritual shape, upending his business empire by injecting an ethical dimension. To redeem himself, he must redeem Farnsworth, setting a “very dangerous precedent” by telling the board they should “play fair,” creating an internal crisis by asking the forbidden question: “Are we hurting anybody?” Like all of May’s men, Pendleton is a figure of pure will. Abbott says in exasperation that “his will is too strong” — he will not be diverted from his goal of playing quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams at the Super Bowl, even if it means rectifying another man’s transgressions.

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May reunited with Nichols to pen the screenplay for The Birdcage (1996), which presents masculine reform and reinvention at both ends of the spectrum. In this remake of  Know the Cast: ‘A Nearly Normal Family’ (1978), drag club proprietors and life partners Albert (Nathan Lane) and Armand Goldman (Robin Wiliams) must engage in a kind of heteronormative cabaret to convince staunchly conservative Senator Keeley (Gene Hackman) and his wife, Louise (Diane Weist), that their daughter, Barbara (Calista Flockhart), is marrying into a morally upstanding family when she weds Armand’s son, Val (Dan Futterman). Hackman’s Keeley is the avatar for the Republican Revolution which swept through the GOP and took control of the House in the 1994 midterms, repudiating Clintonian liberalism in the defense of tradition values — Keeley is the co-founder of the Coalition for Moral Order. Yet he is not without his vanity, projecting an image as strenuously as the drag queens, presenting an exaggerated masculine pose. Val abets the senator, becoming the arbiter for what is acceptable masculine conduct, schooling Armand on his “straight looking” comportment and clearing out Albert and Armand’s apartment in line with the perceived “severity” of the masculine posture. When scandal envelops the CMO, it becomes necessary for both families to play ersatz versions of themselves, to present order and stability in the face of upheaval. The usual calibrations of strength and dependency are upended, and the film’s refrain of “We Are Family” speaks to the way in which the strict social distinctions from which Keeley and his ilk make political hay lose their power in the face of lived experience. Both families come to recognize each other’s capabilities.

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May reunited with Nichols to write Primary Colors (1998), an adaptation of Joel Klein’s political roman à clef. The film is a piece of liberal melancholia about the undoing of the Bill Clinton mythos. Primary Colors follows progressive southern governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta) as he makes his way through the Democratic Presidential Primary, trying to dodge the manifold scandals his insatiable appetites have created. Stanton sells the kind of “feel your pain” liberalism which flourished with the rise of the so-called Third Way; he is a “good old boy” with boundless charm and a repertoire of well-rehearsed anecdotes. Everyone on Stanton’s campaign deeply wants to believe in their candidate, but as the politician’s wife, Susan (Emma Thompson), points out: “Jack Stanton could be a great man if he weren’t such a faithless, thoughtless, disorganized, undisciplined shit.” The Stanton campaign becomes about protecting Jack from himself, allowing the better angels of his nature to overcome the fatal flaw that prevents him from being the liberal savior everyone wants him to be. Stanton’s chief strategist, Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton), is a manifestation of the focal politician’s darkest impulses, sexually harassing and exposing himself to campaign staff — what is referred to as “bird-dogging.” Jemmons is the unreconstructed redneck that Stanton tries to hide behind the soaring rhetoric and folksy charm, slathering himself in southern sentimentality. Along with “the woman thing,” there is also Stanton’s status as an ex-radical, his failure to live up to his male duty by going to war. But the old idealism has calcified into steadfast ambition, a determination to exorcise the ghosts of George McGovern’s disastrous 1972 presidential campaign. Stanton has swallowed the bitter pill of pragmatism — the man understands what he needs to be to prevail, but there is a dogged impulse dragging him back toward the mire. Primary Colors tracks the ultimate victory of the schmuck — the schmuck’s elevation to the highest office.

D.M. Palmer (@MrDMPalmer) is a writer based in Sheffield, UK. He has contributed to sites like HeyUGuys, The Shiznit, Sabotage Times, Roobla, Column F, The State of the Arts and Film Inquiry. He has a propensity to wax lyrical about Film Noir on the slightest provocation, which makes him a hit at parties. The detritus of his creative outpourings can be found at waxbarricades.wordpress.com.

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