EATING RAOUL
Unsolved Murders, Unlimited Laughs
by P. Gregory Springer
Paul and Mary Bland, just like Bonnie
and Clyde before them, are (more
or less) young and in love (although
they sleep in separate beds). Also,
they kill people
Paul works in a liquor shop in a
bad neighborhood until the connois
seur in him obsessively orders a case
of $500 a bottle wine, and he's fired.
Mary works in a hospital, ever at the
mercy of lecherous patients. When
the weirdos of Los Angeles begin to
invade the sanctity of Paul and Mary’s
apartment, a scheme emerges. Why
not entice these loathsome "per
verts’’ with a want ad for swingers,
hit them smartly over the head with
a frying pan, and use the money in
their pockets to finance a dream res
taurant in the suburbs? Why not call
it "Paul and Mary's Country Kitchen"
and feature the Bland Enchilada?
A tine plan for people who are fed
up But, what to do with the bodies?
That's where locksmith/burglar
Raoul unpredictable enters director
Paul Bartel’s new independent pic
ture, Eating Raoul, a title which
alone ensures originality to a film al
ready sopping with sarcastic wit.
When Eating Raoul is seen around
the country this fall through
Twentieth-Century Fox distribution,
the delay and production headaches
that went into its genesis should l>e
quickly forgotten
Eating Raoul makes Bartel's
fourth excursion into mass murder,
although the soft-shaped, balded and
bearded 44-year-old from Brcxiklyn
might be mistaken for a classical
pianist or a sympathetic high school
teacher. With a background of study
in French and Italian, a cultural aes
thetic which leans toward theater
and opera, and a role on the selec
tion committee of Filmex, Bartel’s
role as a director of mayhem and a
manic comic actor make him one of
the most contradictory figures in
Hollywood today In fact, Bartel’s
most recognizable role as an actor
has been Mr McGree, the music
teacher, in Rock and Roll High
School, a role he recalls with both
fondness and agony.
"Do you remember the scene
where the paper airplane with a note
from the principal landed in my
ear?" Bartel comments from his Los
Angeles home "It was an extremely
painful experience. This cardboard
airplane slid along a piece of mono
filament anchored to a plug glued
inside my ear, causing a terrible
vacuum suction with a sort of Im
plosion everytime the plane landed
It would bounce back, ruining the
take. ”
In keeping with his elite ironic
style, Bartel revealed that his favorite
moments in film have all been por
tions of films he had either directed
or acted in. Unlike those of any other
cult director, Bartel’s films all seem
to inherit distinct and separate cults
of followers, with very little overlap
His name is not a household word.
Private Parts (1972), his first fea
lure, ^
passed
through
the first
run circuil
with record ra
pidity, but still
does a "fairly constant
business" through its 16mtn
distributor, UA Classics. “It’s
about a young runaway girl from
Ohio who takes refuge in her aunt's
rundown hotel in downtown LA,"
Bartel struggles to synopsize. "My
mind is drawing a complete blank
today. Anyway, there she encounters
a series of sinister eccentrics, one of
whom becomes her secret atlmirer
but is responsible for the horrible
fate in store for her "
Following Private Parts, Bartel
went to work on Death Pace 2(XM)
(1975) for Roger Corman, a fitnv
which inspired drivers around the
country to joke about a “point" sys
tem for running down babies,
nurses, and geriatric patients, the
blackest of comic notions rooted in
the reality of contemporary highway
tactics. A then unknown Sylvester
Stallone was one of the players.
It was for the filming of Death
Pace 2(MX) that Bartel enlisted the
taletjfs of Mary Woronov, calling her
from New York to star as tine of the
race victims. The former Warhol ac
tress (“She was in Chelsea Girls, of
course, in the Dark Ages") came out
to Hollywotxl, and stayed.
Woronov made other pictures
under the (airman umbrella, starring
with Paul again in Pock and Poll
High School as the wicked principal
Miss Togar Her friendship with Bar
tel and her statuesque proportions
made her perfect for the part of Mary
in hating Raoul, the majestically
towering nurse with a rigid sense of
propriety and a nose upturned at any
hint of physical contact.
Mary (the part, not the actress)
sleeps only with her stuffed doll, just
as her husband Paul sleeps with a
large bottle-shaped pillow labeled
l.afitte Rothschild 1961
Why use Paul and Mary's real
names in the script? "We are not In
life anything like the Blands," Paul
explains "The reason I made the
picture was that I wanted to work
with Mary again, to see if we couldn't
do something subtler and more sus
tained and complicated "
Eating Raoul begins with a gaudy
pseudtvdocumentary montage of Los
Angeles, resembling the newsreel
style Paul originally worked with
when he left the Army in the late Fif
ties As the camera records a sign
that reatls Piece O' Pizza HAD A
PIECE LATELY? a voice-over laments
that, in Los Angeles today, the dls
tinctlon between footl anti sex has
become blurred.
Despite a subsequent record of
successful films, Bartel's difficulties
in financing Eating Raoul are neat ly
legendary He broke every rule, from
the necessity of filming in segments
he could afford ten minutes here
and ten there to eventually putting
up the money of his friends and fam
ily to get the picture finished, at a
cost under $1,(X)0,000
Eating Raoul bears some re
sem
blances
to other
contempo
rary lifestyle
parodies, such
as John Waters'
Polyester or Haul Mor
rissey's Trash. What differen
tiates it, according to Bartel, is a
more commercially attuned script.
luttiiiy Raoul takes the hypocrisy of
certain "moral" attitudes, draws it to
a murderous conclusion of logic,
and makes it all seem as easy as
toasting marshmallows.
Paul and Mary Bland take tips on
their "business" from a homemaker,
mother, anil part time sadist for hire,
Doris the Domlnattlx (Susan Saiger)
After an unplanned rehearsal elimi
nates one drunken neighbor, Mary
lures other sleazy victims with a va
rlety of guises, dressing most un
comfortably as a Nazi, a disciplinary
mother, a cartoon mouse (ears and
all), and a hippie earth goddess
blinded by a rented strobe light
Once the paying customers are in
the proper mood, Paul clobbers
them with cast iron cookware
Raoul (Robert Beltran) carts otl
the bodies tor mysterious purposes.
Beltran, a bona fide Chicano whose
specialty is Shakespeare, adds tre
mendous (nice to the Him, discharg
ing lines like, "Of course I'm era/v1
I'm crazy about you Chlquita! I'm an
emotional, hot blooded Chicano!”
After one windfall slaughter in a hot
lull, Haul and Mary are able to retire
quietly, happily cvct after The eon
elusion for the rest of the cast, how
ever, turns out to lie less satisfying
One of the more delicious ironies
of Tunny Raoul is that the actors,
technicians, and friends (including
Koget Gorman, co script writer Dick
Blackburn, Hamilton Camp, ex-DJ
the Real Don Steele, Buck Henry,
and others) are a tight bunch of
Hollywood peripherals. Blackburn, a
sometime Ampersand contributor,
spends much of his professional
time in London, where he is in de
mand for rewrites, radio serials and
wiggy original screenplay's like the
soon-to-be-shot Slayground. They all
work and entertain together with a
borderline incestuousness that Paul
and Mary Bland's isolation would
never allow. Bartel prizes working
with his friends as the most impor
tant element (a unique one for most
of Hollywood) in filmmaking. Twen
tieth-Century Fox, which eagerly
agreed to distribute the indepen
dently made feature after it scored
well at several film festivals, is bet
ting on the rapport of these mav
ericks to gradually snowball Eating
Raoul into a word-of-mouth hit.
Mary Woronov and Bartel are cur
rently preparing to co-star in Shake It
Up, a film about the Fillmore East
rock showroom in the Sixties, di
rected by Alan Arkush, another in the
clan of friends.
“I’ll play a surgeon and Mary will
play a lighting designer. 1 enjoy rock
and roll, although it’s not my favorite
music. 1 enjoyed singing and dancing
in Alan Arkushs Rock and Roll High
School. Both Maty and 1 were also in
Alan's Hearthecps, a film destroyed
by various studio executives who
had just screened James Bond or
Superman or something ami made it
very, very different from Alan's ver
sion. Somewhere, a cut does exist on
his picture, which was scored with
Mozart," Paul continues. Maybe it
will be shown someday."
As a member of the selection
committee at Filmex, Bartel shows
concern In getting film of all kinds
seen "Filmex is one of my great
pleasures in life, permitting me to
see a lot of films that never get the
atrically released. It gives me the
feeling that I can Ik- instrumental In
bringing films to the public that
might not ordinarily get seen,"
Regarding the culture of Los
Angeles, Bartel admits he would like
to spend more time in New York. “1
like both coasts, but 1 hope 1 am able
to film In New York some day."
In the meantime, he's contenting
himself knowing that Ealing Raoul
has been invited to be screened in
the New York Film Festival this fall,
and he can take in some theater
while he's there
"I'm still singing the songs from
Steven Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll
Along, the nuvst interesting thing I’ve
seen recently," stated the man who
merrily leaves low budget bodies in
his cinematic tracks for the enjoy
ment of people who never remem
her his name
His next film? "The title is Scenes
from the Class Struggle hi Heverly
Hills ”
Maybe it's a sequel.